Star Destroyers, Part III

This blog-post originally composed on the 5th of November.

But no:  actually that’s not really significant.

Sorry.

***

Ah, hello there, Bloggers!  Long time no see:  I’ve been busy.  But now I’m back.

You may have wondered if this was all going anywhere.  Well…

Sort of.

So if you stick with me, I believe I can guarantee you a point of some kind.

And also, no fooling:  some weird wild shit, somewhere a little further on.

So anyway, we were talking about what Star Wars got right, and we were talking about what Star Wars got wrong, because we were talking about the thing that makes Sean Witzke roll his eyes even more than discussions of Star Wars — i.e. we were talking about the elusive beast called canon.  So what’s the interest?  What’s the upshot?

As far as I’m concerned, it’s this:  that the original 1977 release of Star Wars is the only thing that really “counts” as Star Wars…and that the original novelization of the movie, along with its “sequel” Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, and two or three crucial elements of The Empire Strikes Back, function comfortably as part of a deuterocanon…

…And beyond said deuterocanon, there’s nothing else to know.

So, that’s where I’m coming from, and no doubt to many it seems like a reasonably weird place.  Really no Empire, no Return, no prequels, no further novelizations?

Is that really (I hear some of you saying) the best I can do?

Actually, it is…because this is how I choose to assert the “ownership” most fans feel toward Star Wars, in which sense of fannish entitlement I am no different from they.  It’s only that, into that grand space of potential narrative explanation that George Lucas abandoned so totally, I choose to inject my own indifference as an organizing through-line.  Star Wars, to me, is much better off as a splintered failure than a triumph of rational reunification…and so I passionately assert my fannish interest in it to propose that all the wood has gone through the chipper, and all the chips have simply fallen as they may, and the tree is done, but at least we still have its “before” picture to look at so let’s let the past tend to the past while we move on to something else.

However.

If I did have to attempt a recreation of the tree from its chippy constituents, here for your (possible) amusement is what I would probably end up allowing:

The Sith were the original practitioners of “force magic”, and ruled a terrible Empire, until the rebellious, sickeningly “good” Jedi Order arose out of them, and wiped them out ’til there were only a few left.  Sometime later than this, Luke Skywalker’s father becomes a Jedi Knight, and fights alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi and probably Darth Vader too, in the Clone Wars.  But then afterwards, foolishly choosing to go against his Force-peer Vader as he turns to the dark side, Skywalker is killed…and eventually the rest of the Jedi are also killed, all except for Obi-Wan Kenobi, because he has become somewhat depressed.  Perhaps he feels Skywalker’s death at Vader’s hands is his responsibility, his failure…but in any case he survives because he has elected to follow the “guru” path and retire to some out-of-the-way planet as a hermit and teacher.  His motivation in this isn’t entirely pure, however:  he does not teach when he is on Tatooine (because at this point “teaching” would be the same as Rebelling), so much as he simply tries to protect and provide for the son Skywalker left behind there.  This doesn’t really work out for him, though:  he’s rejected both by the Skywalker family, and by whatever passes for Tatooine society.  Heck, they don’t even call him by his right name:  and over time he does less and less about more and more, just a cranky old goat out in the desert, until it doesn’t even matter that he was once a Jedi.

And so in time…he is the only one left, because he really ceases to be one at all.

Meanwhile Vader allies himself with the political forces of the Tarkinites and their Emperor — a very un-Jedi, and even un-Sith, thing to do, but as we shall see he has his reasons.  The Tarkinites fear him, but their Emperor seems to favour him;  so at least in part, the Death Star is built to put him in his place.  Vast scientific forces trump Vader’s obscure power — and yet he is on the Death Star as the Emperor’s enforcer, and everybody knows it.  It’s a funny situation for him to be in, since he’s so dismissive of technology:  but as the Emperor’s enforcer he is there to make sure the Death Star is used as the Emperor wishes it to be used…even though he himself would rather have an Empire of the Force.

Even if he can find no adherents.

But then meanwhile, back on Tatooine…somehow events conspire to bring Skywalker’s son into contact with his father’s teacher, with disastrous consequences.  Luke’s family is destroyed, forcing him into the life of a Jedi apprentice and a political actor…and Obi-Wan feels the currents of the Force swirling around him again, after all this time.

So…it’s a kind of redemption for him?

Or at least:  an opportunity for redemption…

…Finally achieved when he sacrifices himself to Darth Vader’s lightsaber, in order that Luke may escape the Death Star.  And then whatever happens next, remains to be seen.

Cue X-wing bomber runs, Han Solo’s absolutely unanticipated intervention, Darth Vader’s defeat, and the destruction of the Death Star.

And then…on to “The Empire Strikes Back”, which picks up as the Rebels are already fleeing the “ice planet of Hoth”…but nothing of interest really happens until Han Solo flies through the asteroid field.  Thus it is established that Han Solo is awesome, you see?  Which is one of the elements of Empire that made it into my original deuterocanon, as it happens…ohh, that asteroid chase…!

SO COOL…!

…But in it, the Falcon takes a hit from one of the TIE fighters (or something), that cripples its hyperdrive system.  Meanwhile Luke, flying to the Rebels’ rendezvous point with R2-D2, hears Ben’s voice telling him he “must seek Yoda”, the famous and ancient Teacher Of Jedi, though he’s not a Jedi himself — and this is the second important deuterocanonical element — and so Luke flies to the Dagobah system against R2-D2’s wishes, where he meets an annoying creature while spending the whole time looking for the magical Jedi Teacher Yoda, but never finding him.  Along the way, he encounters many problems and must get better at using the Force to surmount them…but of Yoda, there’s never any sign.  Meanwhile again, Han and Leia keep trying to flee the Imperial forces but the Falcon’s hyperdrive isn’t working…they therefore must go to many different planets and moons (including the third moon of Endor) in an effort to evade the Star Destroyers.  After tossing stormtroopers galore at them, Darth Vader enlists bounty hunters to track them down instead, because he can’t just run around all over the place looking for them, because he’s got a job, damn it…and also it’s hard to justify such a huge fleet’s mobilization only for REVENGE, which is what this is:  as far as Vader knows, it was the Millenium Falcon that was responsible for the Death Star blowing up, and the Empire’s enemies must be punished, sure, but…no one’s really ever heard of Han Solo anyway, you know?  And to admit Leia Organa survived the destruction of Alderaan would just be stupid, at this point.  After all, the remnants of Republic aren’t exactly perfectly quelled, you know…

And thus there is a series of showdowns between Han Solo (previously demonstrated to be awesome) and the various bounty hunters who are after him, and he beats them one by one…until the smartest bounty hunter, one Boba Fett (the only one who really plans to sell him to Vader instead of to Jabba), corners him and cleans his clock.  Epic battle:  and then Han is frozen in some kind of ice-block to be taken back to Vader.  Boba Fett doesn’t care about Leia Organa (who by the way is in love with Luke Skywalker) because the specifics of his contract ended up excluding her…nothing personal, Vader, it’s just business…which is a painful irony, because Han might’ve won the big showdown if he didn’t think he had to protect Leia (who he’s in love with by the way) at all costs.  Just before he’s frozen, Han tells her:  “I love you”.  She replies:  “I know.”  Then POOF!  It’s just Leia and Chewbacca and Threepio, and the downed Falcon.  Leia and Chewbacca get it moving again unexpectedly quickly with the help of the Ewoks (because Han was nice to them, or saved them from being blown up, or something), then they head for the Provincial Capitol where Vader and the Star Destroyers will be…the gas-mining colony called Bespin.  Hooray, they’ve got there before Boba Fett, because the Falcon’s so fast!  With some difficulty they evade the Imperials, but then are captured by the (supposedly) less well-trained Governor’s Army.  But actually this army seems pretty darn well trained, you know…

Too well-trained, to not be in the pay of the Empire?

And then finally “Return Of The Jedi” starts with Luke having flashes of Han and Leia being in trouble…just as they’re rescued by Lando, the Provincial Governor who nonetheless owes Han a favour, and who is also (conveniently) part of the anti-Sith, anti-Vader movement within the Empire.  Leia and Chewbacca and Lando (and Threepio) try to rescue Han from Boba Fett…once Boba Fett hands Han over to Vader, though, Lando’s hands will be tied until such time as the anti-Vader movement gives him the okay to “free the Emperor from Vader’s control”.  But gradually it’s revealed that the Emperor is a Sith too, and Vader’s master:  the Empire is just a front, for the resurgence of the Sith.  Leia and Chewbacca (and Threepio) thaw Han out, but then the stormtroopers attack them — then Lando musters his troops against the Imperials, and all looks like it’s going to turn out fine, until Vader walks in and announces that “my Master approaches”.  A super-Star Destroyer moves in, and the Emperor arrives — blowing the pro-Emperor/anti-Vader coalition to bits.

And back on Dagobah, Luke realizes he has to go to Bespin and save his friends.  His annoying native companion reveals himself as the Exalted Jedi Teacher Luke’s been seeking all this time — it was all a trick!  And finally we have the raising of the X-Wing from the swamp, and the “do, or do not” prescription:  Yoda lets Luke go, because “always in motion is the future”, and all the bad stuff we’ve just seen hasn’t actually happened yet.  But Yoda has stayed alive just for Luke, and when Luke goes he will die…so here is the last test, and Yoda will not be able to tell Luke if he’s passed it…he will not be able to tell him if he really is ready.  As Luke flies off to Bespin, insufficiently trained — he really must “trust the Force” now — Yoda’s face is lit in red, and he hears a voice as a ghostly head appears behind him:  the successful Force-penitent Obi-Wan, who seems dubious about the whole thing with Luke, there.  They have a brief conversation about destiny and hope and all that nonsense…with the sense of it being that both Force-Masters must now fade away, awaiting the outcome of events.  If Luke is killed, the Dark Side will have triumphed, and they’ll have no rest in the Force because it will sicken — this is the cosmic dimension of Luke’s story.  But if he succeeds, they’ll be able to come back because the Force will be reinvigorated.  Until and unless that happens, though — they’re out of the picture.

So Luke goes to Bespin, and he fights Vader and is almost killed by him…until the Emperor himself attacks Vader, because he’s decided he would prefer Luke as apprentice instead…after it’s revealed it was Luke (not Han) who destroyed the Death Star even while Vader tried to save it…so it’s Luke who is truly at one with the Force, and that’s a tool the Emperor can use.  Vader roars:  naturally the Sith apprentice must always slay his master, but that isn’t what the Emperor intends, and Vader will not be allowed to choose his time.  They fight, and Vader kills the Emperor…then turns to Luke and says there’s an Evil Apprenticeship available.  But, is it really “evil”?  It’s because of Luke, after all, that the Emperor has died, and Vader has won…clearly the Force “wants” Vader to be Luke’s teacher, now that Obi-Wan is gone…and one day Luke will be Emperor, because there is no more Jedi stock left in the galaxy.  Vader, unlike the Emperor, has a vision of a future bigger than himself:  he was always a religious Force-fanatic, deep down, so he’ll be happy to leave the whole thing to Luke in due time.  Luke can sense Vader is telling the truth, and they have a conversation about Luke’s father, in which Vader tells Luke that it’s his destiny to accept Vader as his new, spiritual father — OMG, just like Obi-Wan was! — and in this way Vader will atone for what he’s done (OMG!), by encouraging Luke to bring a “new balance” to the universe.  No more Sith and no more Jedi:  just Luke and his descendants, bringing peace and hope and order and all that stuff, on into eternity.

But after a little of this temptation, Luke comes to his senses, terminally fries some important control apparatus, and dives down a cooling conduit instead.  The Cloud City begins to fall, and its people, led by Lando, evacuate hurriedly.  The Imperial troopers, alas, don’t make it.  In the confusion, our heroes get away to the Falcon, but the hyperdrive still isn’t working.  R2 unlocks the docking clamps, is about to repair the hyperdrive, then Luke lands on the hull and R2 must go out to retrieve him…so it’s Threepio who must finally get through to the Falcon’s computer, and wire himself in as a hyperdrive shunt –  “OOOOOH-OOH!!! — and they hit hyperspace and they’re gone, leaving Vader to a pretty cool death scene.

Epilogue:  outside the disc of the galaxy, the Rebel’s remaining base floats, and we see the wrap-up.  Luke will go to Dagobah, alone, and live there in the jungle…Leia, conflicted now about her feelings for Han, would nonetheless want to go with him, but the last thing Luke now wants are children so he tells her she can’t.  So Leia and Han and Lando will go to the third moon of Endor, and the Rebellion will go on until a New Republic can be founded.  The various ships depart, and go their ways…we see the ghosts of Yoda and Obi-Wan shaking their heads as they discuss Luke’s sad, self-imposed exile, which they see as a mistake, Vader’s last victory…”That boy was our last hope,”  Obi-Wan says.  But:

“No,” Yoda replies.  “There is another.”

And then there’s a fourth movie that comes out twenty years later, and it’s directed by Peter Jackson and it’s awesome.

And so phooey, Bloggers:  that’s as far as I’m willing to go. So what do you think of my solution?

I mean it pretty much just takes off someplace of its own, doesn’t it?  Awful.  And so surely letting the chips fall where they may would be better than this:  this outright rejection of five-sixths of all that’s “supposed” to be Star Wars.  For heaven’s sake, you know:  talk about entitlement…!

Why it’s practically an atrocity of entitlement!

And yet consider this, too:  my new Internet pen-pal Nate has gone completely in the other direction with it.  And is what I’ve wrought so incredibly different in kind from what he has?

“Just wanted to say I enjoyed your column on the Star Wars prequel
problems.

Upon watching the train wrecks that are the Star Wars prequels, I began
to understand how Lando felt when shafted by Vader in Empire.

To begin with, how can it be that Owen Lars met the droids in Episode
II, when he showed no discernible sign of previously seeing them in
1977’s Episode IV?

How can, when Anakin, already deep in the thrall of the dark side,
echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, “If you’re not
with me, you’re my enemy,” Ben responds “Only a Sith thinks in
absolutes”, when the whole point was that both the Jedi and the Sith had
fallen into a trap of believing absolutes, with Luke’s task being to
restore balance to the Force? The clear implication was that the Force
had a yin-yang aspect, which both the Sith and Jedi had lost sight of.
The core story arc thus was to be Luke’s restoration of that balance
despite opposition from both the remnants of the Jedi and the Emperor.
In choosing to put those words in Obi-Wan’s mouth, Lucas betrayed his
own creation.

Mon Mothma should have been a young woman on the Senate (Gillian
Anderson would have been perfect). The backstory on Mon Mothma was that
she was a young Chandilaran politico within the Galactic Senate during
the rule of Chancellor Valorum and was opposed to Palpatine being
elected. Despite this she remained a senator after Palpatine’s
disbanding of the Republic into the Galactic Empire and his
self-declaration of Emperor.

Episode Three should also have kicked off the plot of the Bothan spies
in the final.

Anakin picking up with Sith Pirates (i.e. Mandalore Red Guards), whom he
would draft into service for the Emperor, was also overlooked.

Since “A New Hope” practically took the plot of Kurosawa’s “Hidden
Fortress”, the prequel should have included a tribute to his other great
film, “Seven Samurai” with a band of Jedi attempting to take back a
planet from the Trade Federation and their mercenary Mandalore Pirates.
Otherwise, since Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” spells out
the template that Lucas utilised for the Star Wars Trilogy perfectly, it
also includes a section on THE HERO AS A CHILD, so this could have been
used for Anakin’s infamous rise.

There was also no need for a Rebel Alliance in the prequel.

Howard Kazanjian, the producer of Return of the Jedi, on the parallels
between the original trilogy and the prequels:

“In the trilogy, there is a competitive love triangle that develops
between Luke, Leia and Han. This love triangle ends peacefully when Luke
learns that Leia is his twin sister. In the prequels, George has planned
a love triangle involving Luke and Leia’s mother, Anakin Skywalker and
Ben Kenobi. The consequences of this love triangle are devastating with
great betrayals and forever changes the fate of our heroes and villains
in the films. So those who watch the trilogy for the first time after
seeing the prequels will be scared to death that the same horrible fate
that beset the heroes in the prequels will happen to our beloved heroes
in the trilogy because of a dangerous love triangle that divides and
destroys close friendships, but fortunately this does not come to pass.”
27 October 1997

I would therefore have developed this love triangle along the lines of
King Arthur, Lady Guinevere and Sir Lancelot of the Camelot legend.
Arthur = Ben (the oldest of the three), Guinevere = the Young Queen
(younger than Arthur/Ben, but older than Lancelot/Anakin) and Anakin =
Lancelot (the youngest of the three).

In Episode II a 30-ish Ben would court the young Queen, who would then
be in her late 20’s, and asking for her hand in marriage, she accepts.
The young Queen was the focus of Ben’s life and would be the only woman
that he would ever love (that is why he lives all alone as a hermit on
Tatooine because he never gets over the loss of the young Queen).

Enter the conquering hero in Episode II: The young, hot-shot Anakin (in
his early 20’s) becomes one of the most decorated warriors of the Clone
Wars and catches the eye of the young Queen. It is love at first sight
for Anakin and the young Queen and they carry on an affair behind Ben’s
back.

The young Queen consequently leaves Ben for Anakin, completely
devastating Ben, who considers this to be the ultimate betrayal at the
hands of his two closest friends (the young Queen and Anakin).
Consequently, Ben and Anakin’s friendship is destroyed. Palpatine takes
advantage of this situation and lures Anakin to the dark side. By the
time Ben realises what has happened to Anakin, it is too late. As a
result of his turning his back on Anakin and the young Queen, Palpatine
uses Anakin in his rise to power. Ben carries the guilt of Anakin’s
fall from grace and the demise of the Republic for the rest of his life.
And tries to resurrect his mistakes vicariously through the young Luke
Skywalker.

Further ties to Arthur’s story could be drawn with the Jedi Council
being the equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table, with perhaps
Yoda as Arthur, Coruscant their Camelot, Anakin their Mordred whom they
refuse to advance, and Palpatine as his mother.

Or alternatively, after Luke and Leia’s mother becomes pregnant, Anakin
begins to become cold and cruel (like Michael Douglas to his wife in
Falling Down) and she falls in love with Obi-Wan (Greek Tragedy).

Speaking of their mother, in the Empire Strikes Back when Luke says
“there was something familiar about this place,” I would posit that he
and Leia were born on Dagobah, and became separated soon after. Whilst
Obi Wan’s brother Owen Lars was to watch after Luke, Leia was sent to
Bail Organa on Alderaan. Luke and Leia’s mother must have survived the
birth and came under the protection of Bail, since Leia recalls her
mother in Return of the Jedi. Alderaan would have been a better
substitute for the cloning technology to have been developed upon.

I also hated what was done with Boba Fett. My favourite revelation was
his charging Jabba a higher amount than the original bounty price, on
the basis that the frozen Solo had become a unique work of art created
by Darth Vader. But I digress… considering Fett had a string of Wookie
scalps on his shoulder and his ship was named Slave I, perhaps he was
originally a slave-trader for the Empire.

Why did he and his crew exclusively get the Empire’s contracts? Could
it perhaps be that he had assisted Vader in his rise to power.

In Dark Empire II # 2, Zasm Katth and Baddon Fass, two Imperial
Dark-Side warriors, state that Boba Fett was a former Imperial
stormtrooper guilty of murdering his superior officer.

You’ll recall Han Solo had also been at the Imperial Academy, but was
sent packing for some unknown infraction. Had Vader perhaps noted Fett’s
mean streak, and made a deal for him to assassinate an Imperial Officer?
I would posit that the Imperial Officer in question was going to
sabotage Vader’s position at the Emperor’s side, so Darth promised he
would set Fett up with a sweet deal as a bounty hunter if he did this
one little job for him. To ensure Fett was not hunted down for the
crime, Vader manipulated circumstances so the young recruit, Han Solo,
who had a record of insubordination, took the blame for the murder.
This leads to Han escaping the Academy, and stealing the slave Chewbacca
away with him.

Otherwise, the braids Boba Fett has on his shoulder are not Wookie
scalps, but are instead from young Padawans he killed during the
“cleansing” of the Jedi temple.

The Battle Droids in the prequels should have been the chrome war
droids, akin to IG-88, thus further tying in continuity.

I would also eradicate Naboo, retain a planet with underwater elements,
but make the aquatic race the Mon Calamari, from which Admiral Akbar
originated. This would explain why his race was sympathetic to the
Alliance… perhaps even have a Mon Calamari end up being a Jedi.

You could then have the Quarren/Squid Heads (who destroyed their own
planet) team up with the Trade Federation. As part of this alliance,
they are promised the planet of the Calamari, since they need an
underwater world to birth their children in. The planet consequently
falls into a Civil War, hence why the Jedi are called in to start
negotiations.

Palpatine should have had the Jedi hunted down and carted off to
encampments to be mass murdered/ sacrificed, ala the Holocaust, so he
could harness their energy via a Sith ritual to power himself up to
become the Emperor. Those surviving Jedi later develop the technique of
dissolving, so he cannot use their energy to become even more powerful.

And I wouldn’t overlook Tarkin’s role in helping Palpatine getting
elected.

I would liken the Great Jedi Purge and Palpatine’s secret betrayal of
his Separatist Council allies that resulted in their deaths at the hands
of his apprentice, Darth Vader, on Mustafar, to be very much like the
Night of the Long Knives when Heinrich Himmler’s SS troops attacked the
rival SA and killed Ernst Röhm and other leaders, eliminating Hitler’s
sole remaining rival and his power base.

I would have Coruscant alternatively named Chandilar.

Another thing that annoyed me was Ben Kenobi being called Ben in the
prequel instead of Obi-Wan. IIRC, Ben stated in Episode IV that:
“Obi-Wan Kenobi, I haven’t gone by that name, since…oh, before you
were born.”

What with Kessel being the planet where spice was mined, like Arakkis, I
would have made this the birth place of Palpatine, like the Emperor from
Dune.

Since Owen was Ben’s brother, and being a Jedi ran in the family, I
would have made he and Beru Lars retired Jedi, using their powers to
farm moisture on the desolate Tatooine.

Perhaps R2 – D2 could be revealed as more than just an astromech droid,
but rather a Jedi Knight! You’ll recall that a great deal of those
coincidences swaying the course of fortune to the Alliance were a result
of the Force influencing our little friend, including his knowing
exactly where to find Obi Wan Kenobi using the Force, hence the initial
argument with Threepio after the escape pod landed and his insistence on
where to go. Artoo influenced the weak-minded Jawas to turn in the
opposite direction to then pick up Threepio. At the Jawa sandcrawler,
when Uncle Owen selects the red droid, Artoo uses the Force to explode
the motivator on an otherwise good unit, forcing himself to be chosen.
With many of the scenes on the Death Star, Artoo more than just plugs
into the main computer, he influences it and works with Obi Wan in
forcing the hand of fate, as he does in the final Death Star trench
scenes. In Empire and Jedi, the force flows through Artoo like a conduit
in many of the scenes. On Dagobah, Bespin, and in Jedi Artoo ejects the
light sabre to Luke to rescue his friends from Jabba. It all makes a lot
of sense when you watch the movies with this in mind.

In the novelisation of Star Wars, Obi Wan, looking back at the fall of
the Old Republic and the Jedi Knights speaks about “the later corrupt
emperors,” note the plural. This suggests a means by which Palpatine’s
identity could have been concealed with a more obvious evil character in
the forefront with Palpatine lurking in the background maybe as an
assistant or as a co-Emperor.

You could also build a better third movie than what we actually got from
Return of the Jedi with elements from Shadows of the Empire! Imagine, if
you will, that the rescue of Han Solo didn’t occur on Tatooine, but
instead they had to pluck him out of a squabble between the bounty
hunters – that a ‘BlackSun’ sub-plotline lead the action directly to
Coruscant – that the second Death Star was being built over Coruscant
itself and that Luke’s confrontation with the Emperor happened right in
the very seat of Imperial Power! Now THAT would have been a fitting
conclusion to the trilogy! *sigh* – if only…

In Star Wars, you’ll recall Luke saying, “My father didn’t fight in the
Clone Wars. He was no knight – just a navigator on a space freighter.”
So he would fly the Falcon. On Mos Eisley, Obi-Wan knew fate was
helping them when Han introduced himself as “the Captain of the
Millennium Falcon; maybe you’ve heard of her?” “Should I?” answered Ben,
tongue pressed firmly in cheek. Ben knew that the Falcon had once been
owned by Anakin Skywalker.”

Crazy shit, eh?  And I have no idea what Nate is talking about there, mostly;  superficially, he and I are quite clearly at odds in the way we choose to approach our fannish enthusiasm, because where I want to blow it up because of how ugly it’s gotten, he would prefer to save it…

Ugly bits and all!

…And so at first glance it seems each of us must find the other to be something of a kook (really, Nate, Calamari? and what in the hell is a Mon Mothma, or a Mandalore Red Guard?)…

…But if you just give it another look, we are not so far apart.  Because even though it’s in the attempt to save all the crazy, ugly stuff I’d prefer to see abolished and forgotten, deep down Nate’s position on Star Wars is just like mine:  we both recognize that the creative absence at its centre is dragging all the meanings it once carried, or promised, down into a big black hole of Who Cares.  So, I’d just toss it all;  but Nate must actually flirt with destroying it all, finding ways to actively contradict it all, in order to rescue it from the garbage can.  Sadly the wonderful flight of fancy called (I think) The Skywalker Paradigm is beyond my poor Internet reach now, or I’d use it to demonstrate how very close Nate comes to embracing a complete subversion of George Lucas’ brainchild — with Darth Vader the hero, Obi-Wan Kenobi the villain, Luke Skywalker the psychotic Doomsday Weapon of a corrupt counter-insurgency, and R2-D2 as the Force Mastermind behind it all who’s trying to hold it together — and it’s really too bad I can’t find it (although that Adam Star’s Esoteric Star Wars is still out there, even now picture-less, somewhat makes up for that lack), because my point here is that cohesive alternative explanations for all the shit that’s falling down a black hole need alternative attractors, “negative energy” if you will, a sort of narrative “anti-gravity”, if they’re to establish themselves in the slender zone of stability between total implosion and total detonation…which is the only place complexity ever lives.  And so the spinning-up of inconsistencies in the Star Wars movies to create a plausible dismantling of everything those movies claim to be showing us, is a powerful tool for challenging the black hole’s pull;  Nate does offer three other things here, as “anti-gravitic” mechanisms of this type, which are rather more conciliatory than the hilarious “good guys are really bad/bad guys are really good/everything you know is wrong” reconstruction, but I think it’s fair of me to say that it all begins with the possibility of a fully negative reading — fair to say that this negative interpretational possibility is what supplies the licence necessary to find other interpretations that lie somewhere between negative and positive.

And the first bit of “anti-gravity” Nate offers here is (of course!) all the insane ephemera of the Star Wars “Expanded Universe”:  which George Lucas has pretty much asserted his right to cherry-pick elements from without regard to whatever pre-existing consistency they may be founded in…but which Nate points out are not perfectly eliminable regardless, by finding ways in which they actually support the “arbitrary” order which was intended to replace them.  Just as, in the second “anti-gravitic” instance, he points out that Lucas’ Campbellian enthusiasms themselves imply a hidden “mythic” structure to the Star Wars story that can’t be simply hand-waved away.  Myself, I’ve got no time any longer for the love triangle of Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur, nor necessarily for the Hero’s Journey…but Lucas still does, and so I think when Nate invokes Campbellian formulae to explain how the Star Wars story “should” have gone, the Star Wars canon must be found to tolerate his revisions as at least “possible” or “allowable” ones…

And finally, the last countervailing force arises (again; but we should be expecting this by now) from Lucas’ own willingness to let the chips fall as they may:  as Star Wars comes to be a sort of foster-home for any SF genre-conventions from other sources, that anyone wants to throw in there.  Cloaking devices and spice planets, tractor beams and mass cloning facilities — well, Star Wars began by mashing things like this up anyway, only with a bit of a new shine put on them, and (as previously mentioned) when your universe is one that supports aliens playing Benny Goodman tunes on fucking clarinets you’ve already shown a willingness to take things on board…

But in the absence of a firm authorial grip on this intake, it’s not long before the logic these devices bring with them must start to show, too:  not long before the profusion of details, the accession to convention, begins to be suggestive (again) of an order that’s no less necessary for not being expressed — that is perhaps even made more necessary for that lack of expression.

Or else…

Or else it is all just, in Jog’s (was it Jog’s?) memorable phrase, three-chord rock;  and so legitimately playable by anyone.

And if you go and visit Nate’s blog, you’ll find a lot of this crazy stuff, this mad and obsessive chasing after reconciliation, this heroic attempt to save even the worst of it all…because hey:  what other parts need saving, anyway?…which is not by any means my sort of freak-flag to be flying, but as I’ve said before, the great thing about “trash culture” (name courtesy of the PrettyFakers, by the way) is that it’s a free culture, a culture built on transgressions, on forbidden interactions, on FANTASY, yo…and so even if it’s not my kind of freak-flag, it is still I think a very admirable kind of freak-flag, being so all unapologetic about its geeky energy and affection.  Three-chord rock?  Heck, Nate’s getting twenty-minute prog drum solos out of it, over there.  It’s maddening.  It’s crazy.  It’s technically disallowed.  But that’s what makes it beautiful!

Of course, I would say that…

Considering the sort of thing I write when I think I’m in private conversation…

So here, rather likely not for your amusement, is an excerpt from an email exchange I had with my friend Jack, of the aforementioned PrettyFakers.  Quoth I:

“So the latest thing about the Large Hadron Collider is something that I’m not sure ought to be taken seriously — I mean, I don’t know if I believe the people suggesting it are being serious, it seems more likely to me that it’s a deliberate joke, a Sokol hoax for string theorists.  I certainly laughed when I encountered it for the first time a few days ago… But it made me think of doing a bit of brushing-up, and so I went around the web reading this and that, finally once again coming across the gedanken that I hate most of all, the time-travelling billiard ball.  The billiard ball is struck, and heads toward the corner pocket, within which is concealed a time machine.  KER-PLUNK!  It emerges from the other corner pocket at just such an angle that it strikes its past-self and knocks it off course.  The first billiard ball, Billiard Ball #1, never sinks into the time-machine pocket at all. Now, there’s nothing really wrong with this, it just annoys me when people call it a “paradox” — of course it isn’t one, the billiard balls represent particles interfering with one another, and one particle’s the same as another whether you have a time machine or you don’t.  You don’t even need for there to be a time-travelling particle to stop Billiard Ball #1 from going into the time machine — you could explain your attempted translocation not working in a number of different ways.  As always, what makes the paradox a paradox is incomplete information about the total system, where “incomplete information” doesn’t stand for “outright misprision”:  the casual assumption that “time” exists as either a) something seperate from space in GR, or b) as something we feel justified in saying we know anything at all about outside of GR.  Physical theories of time-travel are all mistakes, woefully premature:  time travel is still, as I seem to keep on saying, primarily a *literary conceit*.  As far as we know, spacetime’s just spacetime, and there are just coordinate locations in it, and that’s the whole of the story.  “Time travel” is a misnomer, as far as physics goes, because our physics currently doesn’t include a conception of this sort of “time” at all.

But anyway.  Then I read something sort of interesting:  a revision of the billiard-ball business that shows it’s possible for Billiard Ball #2 to just nudge Billiard Ball #1 enough that its trajectory is deflected, but it still makes it into the corner pocket. Now this is far more interesting:  the folks who went at this “nudge” scenario mathematically saying they’ve proved consistency can be preserved even in the presence of a notional “time machine” of this type…that indeed for all possible Billiard Ball #1 nudges, a Billiard Ball #2 path is generated that will provide the appropriate nudge.  So, even if you were a person who was wedded to the idea that it was a bunch of time-travelling particles causing the LHC not to fire, you see…even if you were a person who believed in paradox, in a sense relied on paradox, you could still have a “Chronology Protection Principle” (I resent Hawking “coining” that phrase more than I can say) in action that permitted time-travel.

Okay, where this all comes from, and then where I think it all goes:  the wacky things said about the LHC’s failure to discover the Higgs boson are all about the LHC acting as a universe-splitting time machine — nature abhors Higgs bosons, so whenever the LHC gets turned on, the LHCs that have already been turned on in the future interfere with it in such a way as to cause our universe to select itself as a universe where LHCs don’t detect Higgs bosons [EDIT: Because the thing hasn't successfully been fired yet, is what I'm saying].  Now this is actually SF, in fact I believe I read this story many times in the 80s and 90s.  The most hilarious suggestion has been that we ought to make up a million-card deck, in which 999,999 cards say “turn on the LHC” and only one says “DON’T”.  Then we pick from the deck, and if we get the card that says “DON’T” then we know the universe just split, so there’s no point turning it on.

(I swear to God this is a hoax.  It must be, surely?)

Anyway, so to the paradox-minded this scenario presents a problem — if we don’t turn it on, how do we receive the “message” not to turn it on? The “nudge” theory of time-travelling billiard balls sort of solves this imaginary problem, though only generally and not specifically:  you can have a time-traveller change his own time-travelling past without leaving yourself lots of paradoxical loose ends, because the billiard ball can still go into the pocket…and as it turns out no matter which way it goes into the pocket, there’s a way for it to nudge its past-self so that it still goes into the pocket.  In other words there is always room for complication in the liminal, infinitesimal region between “happened” and “didn’t happen”…because the time machine exclusively produces “near misses”…it can’t hit the target, it can only hit around the target…if you like, it can only hit “fractions” of success, and of course we’ll never run out of fractions.

(You were saying something about the Mandlebrot set, I believe?) [EDIT:  he was, and yes I was trying to be clever with that, so sue me.]

So…it’s fine and everything, although I think they could’ve just asked me about it instead of wasting the time of people with genuine qualifications…but I see an interesting situation arising from this whole “nudge” revelation of “Chronology Protection”, which is:  if chronological consistency (I guess that’s what we’re calling it now) is always preserved by these “nudges”, then we get rid of paradox merely by getting rid of the time-traveller’s ability to detect any changes in the past:  because the “nudge” corrects chronology in such a way as to make all [experienced] pasts consistent with all observed presents.  For every trajectory, a reconciling “nudge”;  for every nudge, a reconciled trajectory.  And then why not another nudge, and another, and another, ad infinitum?  It wouldn’t matter:  we wouldn’t know.  The past would be in a constant state of perfect revision.  More:  if time-travel were physically possible, we would have to expect that it is already going on naturally in the universe somewhere:  much as the argument against naturally-occurring traversable wormholes is that if they’re out there, we should already be detecting time-shifted radio signals from them.  So if time-travel were possible, and the “nudges” were factual, we could reasonably expect that the past is fundamentally ephemeral:  one “second” ago it was a different past, and now it is this one…in another second it’ll be something else again.  An old stoner’s imagining:  did you ever really look at your hand, man?

Of course “Chronology Protection Principles” are not very scientific anyway…who says they’re needed?  Who says the universe has to care about the seeming paradoxes that befuddle human beings?  Maybe it doesn’t matter at all, except to us — and maybe the way we’ve chosen to care about it is wrongheaded:  “must get rid of this paradoxical result somehow, it threatens the theory!”  That is, of course, epicyclical thinking…both in that it’s not scientific, and that it’s historically ignorant:  because our model of the universe is no longer one in which we can reasonably wish to “preserve consistency” — we are already long past the point where it makes sense to chase the ideal of some perfect Principia or other, aren’t we?

The other day I ran into a friend of a friend in the liquor store, who studies Philosophy of Fiction, and over a couple of beers we got to talking about that…suddenly in the middle of me trying to explain an idea I had about Japanese SF (basically that Japan has already lived through the post-apocalyptic motif of the West’s SF, so when Japanese SF offers us post-apocalyptic landscapes the usual Western “cautionary” reading of such a story is superficial:  Japanese authors are not warning their audiences that nuclear proliferation is a bad idea, good heavens!  But rather every apocalypse signifies a failure of imagination…), she exclaimed:

“And that’s why communism doesn’t work!”

She’s a self-styled libertarian, thinks Michael Moore is a hypocrite because his movies make money, etc.  Jejeune stuff.  Looking back on it, what I should’ve said (good-naturedly, of course) was:

“Bitch, who the fuck said anything about communism working?  Is that what you think your “side” has as its big sockdologer, it’s big philosophical credential?!  Because if that’s what you think, you need to get working on some fresh material…!”

I didn’t say that, though, and in relatively short order she’d pressed into my hands an SF book she’d been reading, in which all “modern technology” stops working one day — as it turns out it’s a VERY transparent libertarian-survivalist fantasy — ugly to encounter — which I said was something like we’d been talking about, it’s a future that isn’t extrapolative, it’s just arbitrary…but then she promised me, PROMISED me, that in the second book somebody comes up with a scientific rationale for the big change.

So I was reading the book, and noticing some strange things:  all electrical devices go dead, gunpowder doesn’t burn so much as it smoulders, dynamite doesn’t explode…and yet matches strike, and kerosene lamps burn.  Hmm, most peculiar…could this really all admit of a scientific rationale, even one good enough to suit a bit of SF-noodling? I couldn’t wait;  I came up with the best theory I could. I thought, maybe, maybe you could get away with it if you stipulated that every molecule over a certain weight with single-bonded oxygen atoms in it, suddenly had one of them disintegrate into its constituent protons and electrons.  Then right away each molecule grabs some atomic oxygen again, and so the ozone layer’s back up (well, it’s pretty dicey I’ll be the first to admit), but the damage is done:  air’s a good insulator, but it isn’t perfect, and that’d be a lot of current flowing around suddenly — maybe enough to drain batteries, maybe not enough to kill most living creatures.  A couple of very big “maybes”! [EDIT:  Actually it would be a disaster on an unimaginable scale] But then nitroglycerine would undergo a chemical change, and so would saltpeter…but kerosene wouldn’t, water wouldn’t, hydrochloric acid wouldn’t, DNA actually wouldn’t (I was surprised to discover that)…it could, at a LONG stretch, maybe work well enough for soft SF. But then I found out that, in this book — and you are not going to believe this — STEAM power doesn’t work… And then I threw up my hands, and went to Wikipedia to find out what the later book’s explanation was.

Because I mean really, STEAM power doesn’t work?

The answer was:  “high energy densities” don’t exist anymore, because something (I won’t tell you what, because it’s teeth-grindingly hideous) is draining them off. But of course this is really incoherent:  what are “high energy densities” anyway, when they’re at home?

Anyway I have been avoiding the Phil. of Fiction girl when I see her in the grocery store — don’t want to have to tell her that the book is awful junk. [Also she is nice.] But the comparison I was hoping to make here is:  that “Chronology Protection Principles” are basically the same sort of thing as “high energy-density drains” — they’re both things which don’t count as explanations, only as handwaving excuses for continuing to hold a belief in abstract entities that don’t really exist.  For the survivalist-SF book, that abstract non-entity is “modern technology”…an absolutely useless category unless one wishes to attack another abstract non-entity that couldn’t exist without it:  “modern society”…and for a certain kind of physicist it is finality:  ironically, the ability to say that the past is immutable.  We know this, we know that, we’ve settled the matter, we’re moving on…! But of course we are not:  because moving on is what “finality” definitionally prevents.  The essence of the problem of progress, and why Richard Dawkins refuses to be interviewed by philosophers of science…and just incidentally, what Principias everywhere both rely upon and are ultimately demolished by:  definitional prevention.

Oh, how I look forward to my friend Tyche’s “paper” on  “The Rhetoric of Kurt Godel”!  I think physics is in the midst of a war of rhetoric, and no one knows it…more and more, I’m convinced that the application of a little Phil. of Sci. is absolutely necessary, if we want to get past the point of simply shouting our creed at one another.  The key has to be in a more general sort of science education, but I don’t know how we can get it.  I guess I’m trying to do my bit for it here and there, and hoping it all adds up…which I’m sure it will, because things generally do add up…but at the same time I’m hoping it won’t have to add up to anything so drastic as a “revolution in thought”, or anything like that.  That way of framing things in science ought to be damn well staledated too, by now. Well, one can hope it is.

So…short version is, I guess:  how could I do otherwise, but support Nate’s crazy Star Wars fan-fixes?  When, again, he and I are just the same:  neither of us can sit still for stories whose arbitrariness is presented as the entire reason for us to sit still.  One hears it all the time, on the geek circuit:  “The Avengers are whoever the owners of the trademark called “The Avengers” say they are.”

Which is true enough, I suppose.

But:  not at all an explanation of anything.

Uh…see what I did, there?

…

Yeah…yeah, you’re right.

This was a real long one.

So…you think maybe I shoulda quit when I was ahead?

Yeah…

Me too.

CBC-FM, You Ignorant Slut

This interruption in an otherwise-ordely system of blogging brought to you by a disgusting fridge, and a disturbing car ride.

Welcome, listeners.

You know, I am not against the public broadcaster playing popular music.  But there’s a time and a place, and the place is CBC-AM, and the time is midnight, and the music in my opinion should not be quite so heavy on Ben Folds Five.

If you know what I mean.

And CBC-FM especially should not be clogged with somebody’s pathetic attempt to soothe senior citizens with emo-pop…or even Alternadads, for that matter.  Even Alternadads have more than one kind of musical interest, CBC!  And in fact, even as ordinary people, Alternadads change too…though heaven help them if they do, because where, if this ridiculous drive-time full-court-press indie nonsense continues, is a person supposed to find their classical music and their jazz?  Christ, is Opera at the Met next up on the chopping block, in this new hip hell you’re trying to plunge us into?

Jesus Christ…have you started dyeing your hair?

But that’s crazy behaviour;  you haven’t been young for years.  Hey, CBC, you know I love you.  But you’re screwing up.  My father is now irritatedly flipping away from you, and onto KING-FM.  Yes:  a radio station from the States is now delivering less annoyingly commercial music, than you are.  I mean, what is this bizarre wish you seem to have, to make yourself more “relevant”?  Relevance is in the eye of the beholder, CBC…by all means, if you must, toy with it on TV:  drown me in Being Ericas and The Hours and irresponsibly-edited late night movies, IF YOU MUST…

…But really:  is this the proper function of the FM station, to just play loads and loads of Rufus Wainwright?  Is that what you think we want?  Is that how you handwavingly approximate “culture” these days?  Can you not imagine anyone being interested in opera if they are not brought to it by a love of Atom Egoyan, or something?  Do you imagine there are people out there who find Beethoven dull?

CBC, you don’t have to turn on the red light, you know?  The truth is, we’re all going to get older some day, and when we do we may not have the awful time to waste on keeping up with what the young people are into, that we currently enjoy.  At some point we won’t look so pretty as we’re fooling about with it.  At some point we will want something different.  Some Satie might be nice.  Louis Armstrong.  Vivaldi.  Maria Callas.  You know:  old people’s radio.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

If it doesn’t now, that’s only because it will later on.

Now for God’s sake stop all this nonsense, and start acting your age again.

The Magic Grove Of The Walkman, Part I

You guys don’t understand.

I borrowed a Walkman once — a friend pressed his Walkman on me another time. But this bulky shit hanging off your belt, impeding your movement, and you had to be so careful with it…I mean this was The Age Of Tape, and listening to things wasn’t worth it.

I saw that early.

Oh God, I AM doing the Tony Stark thing now again, ain’t I?

Hey…I don’t mean to.

Let me prove it: you have never heard anything as white as this in your life, I guarantee it. The second time I wore a Walkman it was my friend’s, who pushed it on me so I could hear his favourite Rock Opera, that everyone else he knew hated. He got me extremely stoned, first. Then he kitted me out with the Walkman. He set me to walk around the block, wander the lanes, peek into the yards while I was listening to it. He had lots of money and lots of weed and lots of booze, this guy, and he worried like crazy that people were using him for it…but sometimes he used it, too. So what was the difference? He’s a nice guy, a great guy, a pillar of the community…I still count him as a friend though I haven’t seen him in twenty years, but I make what unemployed writers who are the sons of fire-extinguisher salesmen make, and that isn’t even what poor people make, and so I like him fine but hell if he’s gonna tell me anything…now or then…

But anyway: the Walkman.

Good God, but these things were a pain. You don’t know. So listening to a Rock Opera was just about the only reason anyone would tolerate ‘em. What I was set up with was…

…And I swear you are not going to believe this, but it’s true…

…The first Rock Opera that the band Styx wrote and played. You know: their early stuff.

Understand this now, as I understood it then: “Mr. Roboto” was them getting back to their roots.

Yeah.

So hear my song, Bloggers. Hear it.

…

…So anyway, the business of the Walkman. It had to be a hell of a thing you were listening to on it, for my money, to make it worth the while. Truthfully, it had to be nothing less than a Rock Opera, it had to be nothing less than three bowls-worth…it had to be epic, or it just wasn’t worth it at all. Wandering around downtown by the Capitol 6 multiplex, plugs in your ears…

There’s a reason why I don’t do that anymore, if I ever did. There’s a reason I don’t own an iPod. I saw a ten-year-old kid the other day walking along the railroad tracks with his buds in. I wondered what in the FUCK has to happen for a ten-year-old kid to get a two-hundred-dollar iPod to walk along the tracks with, listening to music he probably doesn’t get, and doesn’t understand. Oh, Bloggers: I’ve lived too long. Apparently there are people out there who are my own age, who can and would drop a couple hundred bucks on an iPod for their young, young child. And I don’t think that’s cool or all right, apparently.

And maybe that’s why I’ve lived too long.

Gotten Scroogey. Get off my lawn. I swear to God I am not trying to do it at all. Jesus, give me some light: I can’t seem to fucking stop.

It’s all Sean’s fault.

…

…So anyway, here’s the thing. Thanks to Sean I’ve gotten to hear “Deltron 3030″ — my own brother’s been a fan of Del for years, and never told me! — I used to listen raptly to “Mistadobalina” in the depths of my very very stoned years! — fucking hell, I wish I could stop doing it, I honestly do — and let me tell you one thing, if I tell you nothing else:

IT TAKES ME BACK THERE.

Back to the days of wandering around downtown, justifying the purchase of the Walkman.

God damn it: it justifies it. This is 2009, and Deltron came out in 2000, so all you folks probably think it’s old school. Let me tell you it is NOT old school. It is the school they tore down to BUILD the old school.

This is music that reaches back into the past, and back into the unconscious. This shit’s ageless and timeless. This shit is some of the most AMAZING shit I have ever smoked, and let me tell you…

IT IS FULLY WALKMANNABLE.

In fact I wish I could get it on tape, so I could listen to it on a cumbersome fucking old shitty WALKMAN — yes that’s how much I love it, that I actively want to listen to it that way: I want to be a delicate music cyborg slithering through the crowds downtown, I want to feel like “Five Years” is pounding in my brain AS I listen to “Deltron”…I want the total experience of the future, that you young kids don’t know, seemed to trickle through charcoal to us in the Eighties…

…Never quite right. Always deferred. We could never finally get there.

Hey, and that’s why there were all those Sci-Fi Rock Operas, right?

Truth is, only Bowie ever did them well, because he kicked them off, and also he knew how to make them…heck, made a mini-career of them…but more on that later, because this is going to be a real long one guys and gals…because I am interested in Del due to being a songwriter, and I have technical things to say about this album. Which is fucking brilliant.

And I’m not just saying that because it so prominently features Kid Koala.

I am saying this is a cross-time tour de force.

Okay, let’s start it up. Get your dorky-looking orange headphones on. Get off the bus.

Let’s start our random teenage walk.

…

You know I tell friends of mine who are not into rap — who don’t have a senseless prejudice against it, but are just not into it — that there is a thing out there called “sci-fi rap opera”…

…And these whitest of whitey-white white guys, these hidebound 70s audiophiles with their Doobie Brothers hair, they all GRIN LIKE THE CANARY-EATING CAT at me when I tell them that. They want it too, you see. They want something that gets started right away, they’ve become jaded about the fancy-shmancy Rock Opera with its awful pretensions…they want something that starts with a bang, like:

“Yo, it’s three-thousand-thirty! I want y’all to meet Deltron Zero!”

Does it hit you right in the face enough, right after that? Easy to say “keep up, or you’ll get left behind”, except that there’s nothing here a person can’t keep up with — the texture of this future is all around us, and you’ve heard of everything in it. Well, wow. The only person ever to front-load a sci-fi pop opera this heavily was Bowie in Ziggy Stardust — if you don’t know what’s going on here right away, you won’t get that album either.

But it’s got something extra to it too…and it gets you ready for it.

“I bounced through a portal…!”

Let me just get back to that in a minute.

The thing is, here is the advantage of rap, here is why all the Rock Operas collapsed so miserably, and why Del soars so high. In an “ordinary” melodic song, there are so many constraints, and there are so few things you can do about them. No matter how poetically sharp you try to get, you can only fly so close to the sun…and you still have to deal with the scan of each line, the scheme of each verse…even in a seven-minute song you can only drop about forty lines tops, because to get a seven-minute song that’s genuinely cohesive/amazing you’re going to have to find a Hendrix to do your guitars anyway — and they’re going to have to branch out into genius-land — or you’re going to lose people.

Not that it can’t be done. It can.

But what’s missing from all that, just because of the musical form, is the thing we call (when we study John Donne) logical density. You can’t build up the texture of a whole world very much in even an extremely-poetic, brilliantly-instrumentalized “ordinary” melodic song…because allusiveness can only accomplish so much, without words to hang it all on!

Believe me, I know!

But in hip-hop the rhymes can come ninety to the minute, and do anything, they can go anywhere, and create anything…for God’s sake they can even be mostly shitty…

…And this is also a strength hip-hop has, that the regular melodic song doesn’t, that the best a “regular” song can get is that it’s very clever but doesn’t cross a line into too clever…so it needs to always be careful to “ground” itself, to not actually be John Donne’s poetry…I mean this is music for the masses, people…!

…But hip-hop can be, and mark me here, as clever as it fucking wants to be, any time it wants to be, because it also doesn’t matter if the rhymes are crude and obvious, I mean of course some of the rhymes are going to be crude and obvious, the whole damn thing is made out of rhyme…!

…So unlike a “conventional” song, it can use any word it needs to: because it can use as many words as it needs to.  And that’s why it’s more egalitarian than any Van Morrison song can ever hope to be, because it doesn’t do “dumbing down”. Doesn’t need to, I would say, in part because it makes more time and space for itself, and its lyrical creativity: the faster the rhymes come the more can be done with them, the more adventurous they can become, and that’s in part because there are no instrumental breaks that rob time from the writing, but rather the breaks are as one with the words, at need…

(Oooh, I had something clever to say, right there. Damn! Lost it. Oh well, we’re gonna be here for a while, maybe it’ll resurface…)

(Oh, whaddaya know Remy, here it is all da time…)

I mean, look folks: this is comics, plain and simple. This is what makes comics great: the pictures and the words are as one. They’re the exact same art. You don’t find that anyplace else. That’s why Alan Moore says comics have so many different “tracks” that can be combined to such wonderful effect…the same reason I’m saying that Kid Koala knocks the shit out of this record. The tracks, the TRACKS…! You can do so much with them. You can make the sound-effects be part of the art. You can use the proscenium to enlarge the subjective size of the screen.  You can draw the eye to a supremely-resonant image, you can bring the sight of the reader to a point of infinite concentration…but I want y’all to stay calm…

Alien annihilation. And here I am right back to it, just like I promised: here’s another thing rap can do that other forms can’t. It can tip the board, and make it work. I bounced through a portal…fuck yeah you did Del, now let’s not waste any time or space, let’s not do conventional transitions, let’s just collide these changes up against each other, let’s make it work as music, let’s not be afraid to slip and slide! In an ordinary melodic song, in a sense you have to tell before you show: the listener has to be prepared for shifts and changes. But not here: this shit bloody well IS Jeet Kune Do, there are no fixed positions, it is hip-hop — you goddamn HOP, for heaven’s sake! I’m not joking, this is the aesthetic of dance: you bring the move, and you blow people away. You don’t set it up in some tedious telegraphed way. You throw it at the receiver in HD: all of a sudden, all at once.  In negative time, the pattern unfolds like a black blossom — aha.

AHA.

I’m telling you: I don’t know why anybody even bothers to make SF movies anymore, now that music is like comics. You can do so much more. There’s so much less waiting around. Screw the budget, screw the rules, you can just make things, and get there with no filler, no delay. Let’s turn the power to the people, damnit.

But anyway…

Back to the music. We’re halfway through the first main track, and the people on the street seem like ghosts to me, transmissions from either the past or the future…or is this the present for real? No way to tell, because this is science-fiction: it’s all just coming in off the shortwave as you fiddle with the dial, and the ionosphere doesn’t give you any guarantees, it just bounces you information…

Quantum jump, and we’re into “Positive Contact”…bit of deja vu, eh folks? And this is straight-up narration, is what this is…you just want to hand the winningly down-singing Del a bunch of discarded SF movie treatments and trashed SF TV pilot proposals, and let him sing ‘em out to a kindergarten class…well, heck, that’s basically what he’s doing, right?

I won’t try to be as comprehensive as Sean. Let’s move on. Oh shit, I did it again, but I can’t help it, it’s like talking about Kirby: his way of thinking gets into your brain…

Oh, and God what’s gonna happen when I try on “Virus”?

I better take a break, before I start creating like a heathen.

Part II is incoming, y’all. Better upgrade my grey matter.

God, I love this record.

Better turn it up. Turn it up, just go walkabout, there’s still a couple hours of daylight left…

Well, ‘Tis Not The First Time I’ve Dealt With The Devil…

…Life must sometimes be played on that base level, Bloggers!

While waiting for the gruesomely long post-to-come, I thought we’d check in on our Darkseid essayists.

Plus our old private local genius Jonathan Burns, who if you missed it in the comments the first time, said this:

***

“IT IS in the nature of things that the Great Leader, once he has taken power and set his secret police as a bridle and spurs upon the populace, will commission an humungous pile of masonry, consecrated to his nobility, his vision and his preeminence in history.

The shallow of mind may think it nothing more than egotism, but it is far more, as the Great Leader will gladly explain:

“The people were lost and confused. The corrosive forces of contingency and chaos had them beaten down. They pled for leadership, the assurance of permanent principles, and an unquestionable authority to pronounce them. Without belief, they were at the whim of every temptation and every deceiver; with it, they are united and deliberate. And how can they believe, if their leader is not uncompromising in belief? Hence this monument, this factual and definitive pronouncement, which will outlast me even as it stands as a bedrock of belief beneath the feet of the generations.”

However, it may happen that in the small hours of the night as the Leader stirs in his imperial bed, enclosed by his great stone walls, his logic will turn against him. If the people go on believing, what was the need of the humungous pile? And if they don’t, what good is it?

Contingency and chaos are what the Great Leader hates most. He thought he had them beaten, but here they are back again, taunting him. “Where is my own belief?”, he rages. “If I am Betelgeuse the Bequeather, what is my bequest???“

It is then that the Spirit of the Wall will speak to him from out of the wall, saying:

“But one thing no-one will ever doubt: it broke a hundred thousand mens’ backs to build this. No other man in your time could have caused it to be built, because no other man was so filled with the Will to Tyranny, and the certainty it brings. These walls will stand, staring future generations down, and with a shiver of wonder and fear they will ask, what kind of man could have done this? And they may remember your own vision, or not, and with gratitude or loathing; it matters not to me. Because I am the Will to Tyranny, and this wall is my monument, whether it be yours, or no.”

The Spirit of the Wall is cynical and sardonic! He is basic and cruel! He indulges the grotesques and dandies who play around his feet … they rise and fall — but Tyranny endures!

That’s the obvious part.

Whew. I can sort of fake up Jolly Jack’s diction, but you notice I don’t even try to reproduce Darkseid’s accent. It’s too remote, and doesn’t compromise in the least with smooth oratory. To be candid, Darkseid’s speech doesn’t allow for fine distinctions. It is all but impossible to use it to make a rational argument, or a credible self-accounting.

Darkseid? A personality???

Mais oui.

We remember that Kirby was both in service in WW2, and a big part of the great funny pages patriotic cheerleading effort. Fuhrers to the left of him, fuhrers to the right. And what pompous pipsqueaks they all were! All but impossible to imagine these ninkapoops waving their hands and squadrons of Messerschmidts springing into being, with parades and rallies and secret police, and being the real threat to freedom that they were. If you’re going to cut it down to comic story size, you almost have to say that the human race has a fatal susceptibility to tyranny as such, which would be a real worry.

But when Jolly Jack breaks out to do his own thing in his own series, he makes the Spirit of the Wall his familiar — and his own personal fright-mask. Yeah, that’s Kirby behind the great stone face, who else?

And now we can all have some fun.

Suppose I am the devilish doctor Moreau Manglewang. Of course I’m going to sign on with Darkseid! Consider the advantages.

I’m just there. I don’t need a second-hand gothic backstory (the good ones are all taken), I don’t need an explanation for my frightful powers — I’m from Apokolips! I can have the best House of Pain ever, with Jack Kirby to draw my surgical racks and instruments, I can have Rhino-Rauders and Leopard Women by the host. If I need a frakin’ army, no problem. On Apokolips, the Will to Tyranny prevails — and provides.

What’s more, Darkseid is the most liberal uberboss you could ask for. He doesn’t make you wear his uniform, doesn’t cramp your own aesthetic in the least. You aren’t obliged to deal with his concerns, origin or superpower technicalities. All he asks is his own small piece of turf, marked “Absolute Supremacy — Darkseidz — Keep Off”, and that you let him ramble on about his Anti-Life Equation. “Do your own thing” is his word, as long as you have a bit of murder, mass insanity etc in mind, and don’t we all.

Best of all, he doesn’t nag. When things are going smooth he always has a positive and insightful word; when it’s your wang in the mangle, he lets you go to hell in your own way with no reproaches or I-told-you-so’s. He truly is the Anti-Dad. Far better than Willy Wonka and his anvilweight comeuppances. Darkseid is almost, dare I say it, the Cat in the Hat.

He is also very decent with the heroes. We have to face it, we are a little bit over the top on the Apokobus. And when a noob skool like the Forever People show up, they’re naturally a bit over the top too. It could all melt down into embarrassment — except that Darkseid will be there, looking like a thousand pounds on two boots, with a portentous pronouncement or two, lending the situation his considerable gravitas. When it’s Scott Free, you notice he stays out of the way; Scott brings his own measure of seriousness.

It must get to be lonely, being him. We all have our own special manias and he supports us, but by that token, none of us have a sincere handle on the Big Picture, or want one. Highfather is such a Dad, the way he takes every casualty like a knife in the heart, you can see why he and Darkseid wouldn’t have more than an uncomfortable silence between them.

The only one who really speaks his language is Orion. You should hear him — “It’s sad, Slig! War is terrible and sad!“ While grinding Slig’s Mother Box into powder, I might add. The old man is so proud of him: he addresses him pretty much like an enemy of equal rank, and when Desaad or anyone tries to belittle him, they get a handsome correction. It’s one of Darkseid’s few prerogatives: Do not diss Orion.

So what does this add up to? I guess I’ve given a picture of someone remote and self-absorbed; not the chatty kind, not a person to want or offer personal friendship. But it would be a mistake to take that as the remoteness of repression, the fear of opening up, the wounded ego. No, no. Everything about Darkseid speaks of immense confidence, magnanimity, an eagle’s-eye overview, and an endless resilience to setbacks.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.

Indeed, I could just about take Kipling’s poem couplet by couplet, and capture something of Darkseid with each one, right down to, “And which is more, you’ll be a bore, my son.” But Darkseid is far from boring, because the company he keeps is endlessly varied and entertaining, while he himself is a riddle, both in his emotional reserve and in his cryptic epigrams. You have to keep watching him, just because the next thing he says might offer a clue.

Why he is not inundated with female fans, is beyond me.

My final verdict is, Darkseid’s personality is Jack Kirby’s, if Kirby were to roll up all his outrage and frustrations with human viciousness into one Spirit of the Wall figure, and then, cynically, sardonically, make him a FAUST entirely in command of his DEVILS, and the majestic ringmaster of the greatest circus act on EARTH“.

(I hope Jonathan will pardon me my colourful textual additions, that I put in only to distinguish his magnificent text from my unworthy own)

But then as brilliant as Jonathan is…it’s all about inflection, isn’t it?

So here’s another friend, Mr. Andrew Hickey, who is not afraid to bloody well RUN with a train of thought…and try to beat it…!

And today’s latest:  more freakin’ Panel Madness from our own Marc Burkhardt, and it’s good stuff in my opinion.

See, I told you guys this would be good.

Oh!  And I almost forgot:  our patron saint.  The first one to respond to this…I guess I’m calling it…meme.

My that’s a lovely header you’ve got there, friend.  What’s it of?

Still to come, I hope:  the inestimable RAB, who summed up for me what the New Gods were all about most elegantly, lo these lost Internet months ago…

And maybe one of the Mindless?

I can’t wait to see how they bring it back around to Brendan McCarthy, can you?

NEW POST SOON.

 

The Placeholder Parade

Don’t worry, Bloggers:  at the end here comes a great bloated garish Santa.

Boy, I have been working on this for a while.

Hope you like it when it gets here!

Autopsy Of The Butterflies: Ten Questions And Geoff

…And so with the final turkey sandwich of October now being fully eaten-up, Bloggers, here’s a thing I had a lot of fun doing over the last week or so: a mini-interview with Geoff Klock, to round off the recent intersection of my blog with his. I confess I really enjoy these blogoverse-only interviews, maybe it’s narcissistic but it gives me a real sense of being part of a community…and sometimes, even quite often, I think “community” is a rather dirty word, but maybe that’s because it gets used so much in so many rather dirty ways?

It is all in how you look at it, I guess. But perhaps names don’t matter so much as the things they refer to, and if they don’t then we don’t need to worry about them so much…I mean “community” may be a good thing or a bad thing, a term used for good or ill…

…But I think the give-and-take of conversation is good wherever you find it, no matter what name it goes under.

So!

Let’s have some, shall we?

***

PLOK: Geoff, I notice a particular (and appealing) item in all your online bios: that before writing “How To” you worked as a night watchman for two years, and read a book a night…and for me, I immediately jump from that to Colin Wilson sleeping rough outside the British Museum while he wrote “The Outsider”. Did you, or do you, feel like you have some “outsider” status in the academic world, or indeed the working world?

GK: My point of reference when I worked that job was the final issue of the Invisibles, where someone says “My Invisible initiation involved three years as a trainee accounts manager. I learned to shovel numbers, go home and dream, get fat on tortillas and Oreos. Then when I was ready, I found them again.” I totally told myself I was an “outsider” — I went to academic conferences as an “independent scholar.” But the thing is I was outside because I wanted to get inside — I was doing this to get into fancy pants grad school. When I got in, I was relieved to be inside. Then I got a job at a community college which sort of puts me outside again, except I am full time and not an adjunct which is more inside something else. Also — my equal interest in poetry and pop culture means that folks that see themselves as high culture folks and pop culture folks can consider me an outsider or an insider. So I guess those terms don’t have much use to me except as a sort of personal psychological boost — at 3am by the water in downtown Manhattan trying to figure out why I dropped out of grad school while wearing a clip on tie and a whistle on a chain I can tell myself I am an outsider-badass completing my Invisibles training and then bounce back to doing something important.

PLOK: Re-reading “How To” a little while ago, I was struck by how much I prefer it to the various pop-philosophy books that seem to be somewhat in vogue lately — I think because it offered me a look into some stuff I was completely unfamiliar with, through the lens of a pop culture I knew well. Maybe in something like the same manner that people manage to plough through The Da Vinci Code because they’re interested in these new ideas they never heard of, despite the atrocious writing? [EDIT: Damn it, I did not mean to imply Geoff's writing was atrocious there! Shit! Actually I found it quite lucid!] Actually I think that’s a major part of the appeal of detective stories too: the exposure to new subcultural knowledge through the familiar tropes of genre fiction. And those are somewhat loopy comparisons, I know, but…most pop-phil books I come across seem to be loaded with arbitrary or off-hand demonstrations of, you know, how to find Platonism in the Simpsons or whatever, and they don’t seem particularly apposite, just a bit perfunctory. “Look, you can find philosophy in everything, it’s actually really interesting you guys!” So, were you consciously choosing a more focussed and off-the-beaten-track kind of pop-phil strategy, or was that just the effect of your academic training, or did it just sort of all fall into your lap one day?

GK: At school I went into a meeting with one of my college supervisors and told him about my dissertation, and he responded “You seem to really like POETRY.” At first it took me by surprise, because I knew so many people writing about poetry, but the more I looked around the more I understood what he meant. A ton of people like some THEORY primarily — some PHILOSOPHY — and then, as part of making it fun or palatable or accessible or as part of making their lives easier they say Look, you can see it in X popular thing. To paraphrase some guy, people say they like poetry or whatever but what they really like is something IN the poetry. I did start life as a philosophy major but some book or some teacher turned me around into looking down on people who did not take seriously the art part first and the idea part second. And I feel like maybe 20 minutes after that happened I started writing the book, with really no sense of anything like what was going on in like cultural studies or whatever, very much a substance over style discipline. I guess in that sense it sort of fell into my lap.

PLOK: I mentioned this to you before, but it always seems to me like you, Douglas Rushkoff, Henry Jenkins et. al. are all in this peculiar no-man’s-land as far as the “fans/pros” divide on the Internet goes…even the “pro critics” like Spurgeon or Noah Berlatzky, or indeed the “semi-pro” critics like Tucker Stone or Abhay Khosla, seem to belong on a continuum with the fans and the creators that the guys with academic credentials are more set apart from…I mean even given that Rushkoff has written a comic book, he’s *still* can’t quite make it onto that ladder, it seems! So, do you feel any of this kind of marginalization going on, for good or bad? Or do you feel that the Internet helps to level all these differences out so much that it really isn’t an issue?

GK: Let me rephrase the question to be sure I understand it (and if I do not let me know): People who write about comics — some are mainly fans, some are mainly professional critics that are more objective and sane, and I and some other people don’t fall well into either category, and when that happens marginalization occurs? There are days when I felt marginalized (like I am not really quoted much in other books about comics) and I always attributed that to the fact that my book was a bit on the pretentious side even when it was making solid observations. There are days when I felt totally central — like when I got to speak at the Met. And if I am marginalized it has to be because I did not really dive into more work on comics: Peter Coogan has this dream that comics is a small field and if you work hard and make connections how hard is it to get to the center of it? Whereas I spread myself too thin at times — I don’t want to write another book on poetry OR comics because I feel like I already did that. I want to write about TV or film or music or GOD or whatever. Except you know life keeps getting in the way somehow. As for the pro/fan divide I AM a fan (or at least I used to be — GOD COMICS KIND OF SUCK RIGHT NOW) but I am trained as a professional critic and no clear side of that debate won, although I do feel like the professional side is all style and the fan side is all the content. I can’t imagine being a movie reviewer who was just assigned movies to go see and write about. I have to wait and see if a thing grabs me — and the thing that pisses people off about me is how often I just don’t give a damn even when it looks like I should (Morrison and Quitely’s Batman for instance). It feels to me like comics for example just are not as exciting as they were a few years ago, but I am open to complaints that I have become jaded or something. But you know — what the hell am I supposed to do about it except keep going to the movies or whatever. I think I got off topic here so I will try to answer your last bit there: I just don’t read comics crit broadly enough to know what the internet does to the fan-pro divide for critics. But I know I like fan-critics because for god sakes let’s start with caring about art first and ideas next. Fans err on the side of being too passionate, whereas critics err on the side of just being totally uninvolved and the fan error is the one I want to be stuck with if I have to be stuck with one.

PLOK: Doesn’t like Morrison and Quitely’s B+R…? STONE THE UNBELIEVER, BRETHREN…! HEY, RUBE…!

…Heh. Well, not to project my own stuff on you, I shouldn’t perhaps have employed the loaded word “marginalization” as I did, to me it means something less like “being excluded” and more like “enjoying a very weird and hard-to-reach vantage point that’s got to be good for something...”

Although sometimes I think that may just be me, the lies I learned to tell myself after my Invisibles training failed…my choosing to believe that being a dilettante is some kind of road to Enlightenment…

Is it just me, though? You make me feel a bit better about my own comforting daily white lies when you say you don’t want to repeat yourself, that instead you want to write on TV or music or movies or God or whatever HITS you…I mean, as far as I can see the customary vision of “success” is the one where you DO repeat yourself, and not only that but it works better each time, and the trick is finding the stuff you can concentrate on as early in life as you can manage, that’ll secure that success for you. But perhaps in these days we don’t need to do that as much as we once did, maybe that’s an outmoded script? More lies, I guess: you say you couldn’t imagine the dreariness of being a film reviewer, just churning out this opinion or that opinion for your daily bread, and yet a million people in your line of work and thought and critical predilection and generational interest would probably jump at the chance to do this, that would be their perfect Elysian snapshot of the ideal life: hip young professor, new movie critic for the local paper, Promethean scenester…cool guy!

So I guess I’m asking…what makes you recoil from that snapshot, if indeed I’ve got it right and you do? Is it something to do with the “poetic” fannish enthusiasm, or the “philosophical” critical training, or both? Or neither?

Or, you know…do I even come close to the mark, here?

GK: I think you are right that the image of success is repeating
yourself with variations: Bloom and Zizek, just to name two writers I
really admire, do that exactly — just sort of say the same thing in
every book for years, with a very slight “development” maybe. I think
the reason I don’t want this for myself is that very early on, like
maybe 8th grade or something, my path got “set” by Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance (that, and wanting to be like Chris from
Northern Exposure). That book, which looks very quaint to me now (but
which also predicted my eventual status as a composition instructor)
argued that we are far too specialized, everyone working in little
cubbyholes and not seeing the big picture. Emerson said it better,
about how we are all dwarves or whatever, but that idea really stuck.
So as a kid I wanted to be this sort of general philosopher who could
talk to anybody about anything — the fact that I ended up being the
“comics” guy or the “poetry” guy (and you can see me resisting
specialization by having two things there) was the result of the grad
school machine which simply will not let you leave with a fancy degree
unless it is very specific — and even in my doctoral thesis I covered
poets from Blake to Anne Carson, from England to America, from the
18th Century to the 20th. And I would have gone even more broad except
I am not so good with the foreign languages (though I did shoehorn in
as much Dante as I could). I think one of the people I really admire
is someone like Stephen Soderbergh — the guy seems to be able to make
any kind of movie he wants from star-studded moneymakers like Ocean’s
11, to tiny indie things like The Girlfriend Experience, to long and
political stuff like Che to movies like Solaris where he has to KNOW
he is going to lose money but is going to do it anyway because he has
accumulated enough financial and cultural capital to get away with it.
Getting back to Chris from Northern Exposure I think TV gave me this
image of an intellectual as someone who just knows EVERYTHING, who has
something to add to any subject, and that made me not want to be the
other image of the academic, the guy who just knows this one tiny
corner of the world and misses the big picture. I never thought about
it like this before, and typing it it feels really silly, but there
you go. TV gets right under your skin.

PLOK: I recall someone asked you something like if you would be writing a next book after “How To”, and I believe you replied “well, I kind of figured this blog would be the “next” book”…do you intend “Remarkable” as a project, something that could be thought of as belonging to your body of work, rather than just an online hobby plain and simple? Or am I possibly making you sound like a guy with absurdly over-firm intentions and motivations?

GK: Like the thing about outsider status I just tell myself lies so I can sleep at night and then I tell them to other people sometimes when I forget where I am when I get asked a question. I did say that, and that may have been my intention at some point, but now that just seems like a way of appearing to have a plan and staying active when I do not have such a plan. I see the blog as a place where I can do writing and get feedback on whatever it is, and every writer needs that. I guess I see it now as place where I could begin to write a first draft publicly and get feedback and support or whatever, and I keep telling myself I need to start a long term project there — like the New X-Men issue by issue thing, but longer: at one point I wanted to blog about every episode of LOST and then collect it into a book but then the 5th season of LOST was such a letdown. I still think about doing something big and I have a list of ideas and maybe I will do something but I am just sort of waiting for some project to sucker punch me and fucking DEMAND to be written. I believe I am almost there, but I also tell myself that a lot so maybe more lies?

PLOK: Aha, so LOST screwed you over, strangely I feel the same way about “Survivor”…not joking there, I actually feel like it screwed me over, I admired that show for what I imagined it taught me about the secret inner lives of Americans, and I found it incredibly addictive for just as long as I thought it was doing that, but then it seemed like it became determined to wash that stuff right out of its hair, and in something of a hurry too. Not that it was really being made with me in mind, of course…but I still totally sympathize with the wanting for something to come along and punch you in the gut, and then you’re hoping this thing here will but it just kind of fizzles out instead…never follows through…

So what is it, that gut-punching “something” you’re waiting for? I mean obviously one never specifically knows what it is until the gut-punch actually arrives, but is it possible to ready yourself for it, can you kind of feel out its shape by its absence, to know what it probably would have to do with, or how you would recognize it…what you would recognize in it? You mention TV and movies (I carefully leave out God, lest He screw up my question)…so is it something of modernity you’re looking for, something properly and satisfyingly up-to-date, that you don’t see out there, or that you see being only half-formed or half-accomplished? Can’t help thinking of your New X-Men series in this regard: for most superhero fans, a breath of fresh air, a shock, all the while still being comics, so…you know, here’s this weird-looking thing, but it’s still comics, so deal with it, fanboy…!

So is it that you’re looking for another “New X-Men”, another irruption of “see, or also it can be like this too, you guys!” into tired old formulaic mass-media offerings, that reinvigorates them? Or is that you’d just pretty much be happy with anything that punched you in the gut?

How attached are you to the conventional media channels, as a place to look for new poetry or new philosophy?

GK: I am just waiting for the thing to hit me in the gut and I don’t
care what it is in a way, and I don’t think I even GET to care what it
is because it is like a religious thing — it chooses you, you don’t
choose it. It is like asking me what kind of person I might fall in
love with — I can give you a description of my “type” but it is very
possible to end up loving someone who is not your “type” at all. It IS
possible to ready yourself for it and that is all I do with my time
really. To continue on the sex-relationship theme, I remember this
response of Dan Savage to a reader of his column who wrote in and said
he was 15 and a virgin and wanted to know how to get laid. Dan Savage,
and this always stuck with me, told the kid to FORGET about getting
his 15 year old self laid — no one wants to have sex with a pimply
15 year old — and concentrate on getting his 20 year old self laid:
read books, get active in causes, hit the gym, eat right, work on a
good hygiene routine, talk to people so you have good social skills,
listen, etc. This is what I do now waiting for my next subject to
arrive — I exercise so people will not distrust me for being a brain
on a stick, I keep the website up with the help of guest bloggers
because when something comes I need a strong internet presence
(blogger, facebook, twitter etc), I stay organized and get stuff done
at work so I can successfully find the time to do something when it
arrives and so on. And if that something never comes, all that stuff
is not so bad on its own. And I am pretty attached to conventional
media channels for subjects since I don’t want to speak about someone
so obscure no one knows what I am talking about.

PLOK: One of the more resonant remarks from an online friend that I’ve encountered went something like (I am doing some violence to it here, ’cause it’s late) “some people see Star Wars and they get into Kurosawa, get into movies…other people just want some explanation for why the evil Jedi have red lightsabers…” Awful to misquote it this way, but I’m just trying to batten on a point here, which is that I think there’s a legitimate field of fascination in the autopsy of the butterfly; and yet I also firmly believe the thing fans ought to do is, um, “broaden their fandom” — or use it to understand other fandoms…?

Well, maybe I overstate the case by saying I firmly believe it…I mean I guess I don’t sound very “firm” in that belief…

But I’m thinking of how another friend of mine was heavy into those weird little brightly-coloured Japanese vinyl toys for a while, the thick glossy magazines about them, how Japanese rock bands jumped on the “vinyl toy thing” in their promotions…Japan seems to turn up these new faddish fascinations all the time, like rough diamonds, and yet in the West we’re stuck so heavily on the past…I mean, my latest fascination is a ten-year-old sci-fi rap opera, I’m currently boring EVERYONE I know with my complaints that this isn’t a major part of the way we imbibe SF now, as MUSIC…or alternatively, I mean how wrong is it that the best skateboarding movie we got out of the Eighties was “Repo Man” even though there was no actual skateboarding in it, and the skateboarding movie that was mostly about skateboarding from that time was only “Gleaming The Cube”?

I don’t know, is it that we’re just spending so much time getting into why the bad Jedi have red lightsabers, and not enough time looking for more enriching connections that are more external to our fandom?

GK: I think broadening fandom is exactly what folks should be doing.
That is one of the reasons I like the Planetary as it opened. Before
issue one I had never really thought about the relationship between
the golden age comics and the pulps but after that I went out and read
some pulp novels and they were pretty fun. Planetary had this potential
to point comic book fans to all kinds of other things, but it of course
eventually just kind of petered out for whatever reason. I distrust
the hell out of nostalgia. It feels like the shadow of an experience.
I get that it is comforting, and I find stuff like that comforting,
but then I see people who after a while ONLY listen to the music that
was on when they were between 13 and 17 and that is not what I want
for me. Again, for me, it is all about role models, and one of the
reasons I wanted to be a professor was all the professors I knew were
in their 70s and still saw and talked about in class all the most
recent movies or whatever and they seemed more into the current culture
than my parents who were 30 years younger. I have an irrational fear
of cliched roles we can live in and I just don’t want to be the old
guy who doesn’t get kids today or whatnot — and it is not an easy
thing to do as I get into my 30s and now don’t know who the guest
stars ARE on the most recent Simpsons episodes (and who the hell still
watches the Simpsons anyway). That is what is great about influence
and genre and all that stuff that I like so much — everything you see
points you in 10 different directions to both the past and the future
of the genre and medium and other genres and mediums. Follow those
paths and stay young maybe? And just in case it gets too insular too
much of the snake eating its own tail you can always jump to analogous
stuff, as I did comparing poetry to comics.

Looking at these questions like this I get to thinking about PEOPLE
and broadening from watching stuff to talking to folks, or spending
all this time prepping for some imaginary conversation or social
circle or lecture series or something. And I don’t know what to say
about except it is really good that spending time with books and
movies and comics and poetry and music is an end in itself as well as
a means to an end, because even if I never DO anything else ever
again I won’t say that I have wasted my time.

PLOK: How would you describe yourself as a comics aficionado, or indeed as a pop-culture geek in general: more on the passive or random-sampling side, or more the active “passionate consumer” type? Do you think of yourself as a “highbrow” or a “lowbrow” kind of reader of pop culture, or do you think those distinctions are artificial?

GK: As a comics reader I like prestige-pop — genre stuff that comes out rarely, and is always of very high quality (great writing great art accept no fill-in artists) and that gets shut down when the thing needs to be shut down (rather than continuing as a money-making franchise): I like Hellboy and All Star Superman and Casanova and Frank Miller on Batman and so on. I don’t think there is a name for that kind of comic book fan, but that is what I am. I don’t really care about Superman I care about the 12 issues Morrison and Quitely did. (I am a sucker for the X-Men but not enough to get it if there is not a great team on). I will get comics that have EITHER great art or great writing but not both — but that is just a kind of completist thing (like when I got some Bachalo Spiderman issues, or the recent Batwoman JH Williams III run): I never really emotionally invest in those. But now that I think of TV I am even less sure how to answer because I do emotionally invest in stuff I can see it kind of basically dumb (LOST) as well as “highbrow” TV like the Wire (the Wire is highbrow right?) So I guess I am forced to say that the highbrow lowbrow distinction does not do a good job explaining my pop culture consumption habits.

PLOK: In the great big comics “canon”, such as it is (or rather, such as it *isn’t*), who’s a beloved name that you’re really attracted to, and who’s is a beloved name whose work you’ve never really been able to get into?

GK: I love FRANK MILLER really deeply and I am kind of mildly terrified what kind of horrible things that says about me. That is the comics person I have loved the most and the longest and I do not know what to say to people about it exactly, except, as my wife will tell you, I seem to have a kind of sick hero worship of people that are obviously crazy. I was NEVER able to get into Brubaker. I don’t know what I am doing wrong but I have read a bunch of his stuff and it just leaves me cold. I don’t hate it — I just don’t get what people see in it. Ennis either, but that is more a sense of humor thing I think, we don’t share the same kind.

PLOK: That bit about Frank Miller makes me laugh — I recall you mentioned to me that you don’t “get” politics, that you’d be sitting playing the Hulk video game and your friends would walk in and say oh that Geoff, look at him and his “innocently” violent entertainments, ha ha, and you’d be baffled…

Something like that, wasn’t it?

Hmm, so maybe lowbrow/highbrow really doesn’t do a good job of describing your tastes, because I don’t know if that distinction doesn’t require some sort of quasi-political orientation to start with — e.g. “this is the good stuff because X,Y, and Z; and this is the bad stuff because it isn’t X,Y, and Z and therefore by definition it’s anti-good stuff” — even if you’re not coming right out and saying “liking stuff” is a political act (at least not as far as Batman and Superman go), still I think a lot of people struggle with depoliticizing their idea of their taste, at least to the extent that, you know, they’ve got a guilty pleasure or displeasure according to some code or other, and is that okay, etc. etc. etc. And obviously we’re all hoping it will be okay, that we won’t have to change any of our opinions about what kind of person we are, just because we like something JUST BECAUSE we like it…or dislike it for the same reason…so I think I won’t ask you, as I asked the Mindless Ones, how obligated we are to do something with a favourite artist’s politics, whether that something is to care about it or ignore it or what…but maybe I ought to ask you, while I’ve got you here, how you perceive other people’s dance around those political elements, since you seem reasonably immune to them. Are most of us dancing around, saying weirdly-at-odds stuff a lot of the time? Are we all caught up in justifying our tastes to ourselves, slathering this extra stuff all over it, do we look like maybe we don’t believe everything we believe? Not that I’m asking you to pass judgement on other people’s tastes, but from your Frank-lovin’, Ed-not-gettin’ perspective do you ever see groups of fans getting hot with one another over this comic or that comic, and feel like you’re watching a bunch of manifestoes fighting it out over newly-discovered territory? Like, someone trying to deliver a whole boatload of external consistencies, to an experience that you find more simple or more direct?

GK: That Hulk example you remember exactly right. Academics often
come off like that to me: kill joys, telling me the stuff I like is
actually really bad on this political level. Although a lot of time I
actively ignore how bad the stuff is on that level, it is not that I
don’t KNOW it is bad. I know chicken fried steak with cream gravy is
bad for me. Hell: part of what makes it fun to eat is that I KNOW it
is bad for me. It becomes like the warnings on cigarettes, the thought
that people smoke them because they just have not heard they are
unhealthy. I think you are right about that high low culture split
being a political thing – but the politics people tell me there is
nothing outside politics, nothing outside their thing, to which I fire
back that there is nothing outside my thing, aesthetics, which like
them I claim is the umbrella term, politics being only a form of
aesthetics and round and round we go.

Your point about people hoping the thing they enjoy will be ok,
justifying it as ok, is exactly right. But since I am going to
manipulate the results so All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is
something I can still read why not just skip the justification and
start with the comic book? And as far as following the politics of
artists goes why on Earth would want to do that? I would not take
political advice from Frank Miller any more than I would medical
advice from him. He is a Batman expert so I read him just to watch
what he does with Batman. See, when everyone else was reading Said I
was reading Walter Pater who said that you should never allow any
ideology, even your OWN, to prevent you from enjoying the hell out of
some good work of art. This is a guy who went to church because he
thought the ceremony was really nice looking, so I think he would have
liked a Frank Miller comic. And as for your “boatload of external
consistencies” Emerson and Whitman, two of my favorite writers, were
big fans of contradicting themselves. Enjoying stuff should come
first: “Damn Consistency” was a title Emerson wrote that he wished he
could have used.

PLOK: A pretty good title for a blog, at that. Well, I wish we could keep this going a little longer, myself, but man it’s difficult to cut and paste all this stuff from email, and try to make it look presentable, and besides longer conversations are exactly what we have blogs for, I guess. So thanks a lot, Geoff, it was a blast — although, wow:

Chris In The Morning?

For me it was Fleishman, all the way.

Oh my God, talk about identifying with a crazy person. Thank goodness we did that last question…!

Before our time today was up.

Really enjoyed this; I shall sacrifice a few bottles of beer to the Mindless Ones tonight for instantiating the inter-blogger interview form. In fact I am already well on my way.

Yoko Ono’s 151st Dream

…So there I was, Bloggers, just a few months ago: walking down the street, and suddenly I see this little Japanese lady in these giant wraparound shades zooming past me to the west in her old beat-up dark-blue Corolla, and I thought…

“Yoko?”

There was something amazing about it. Here’s this incredibly ubiquitous car, such a commonplace that you see it all around you even when it isn’t there, and you don’t see it when it is — the very automotive version of a Purloined Letter, the best-selling car ever manufactured by the good people at the Fnord Motor Company…anonymity that puts all the black-tinted windows in all the limousines in the world to utter shame.

Anonymity that, frankly, money and fame can’t buy.

So I shook that sight off. For a while.

But then I got curious, and it was then I found myself bouncing off the walls of the bottomless rabbit-hole.

Because Yoko had actually been in town that weekend.

And she had actually been supposed to appear at the UBC campus to the west, for some kind of peace ceremony at (one presumes) our world-famous Museum of Anthropology, at 6 p.m.

I saw the beat-up piece-of-shit Corolla pass me at about 5:45. When I knew as well as I know my own soul: that it contained week-old spent coffee cups, three inches thick of old Georgia Straight newspapers in the footwells of the back seat, broken cassette tapes and meaningless flyers and superfluous keys on the passenger seat.

So it could have been Yoko…

…If only I could figure out how it could’ve been Yoko. And not that there isn’t a lot of philosophical shit here, because there is…

But how did she get into it?

Not that I mind having Yoko in my life…but for God’s sake I always thought that was a forbidden transaction!

I mean what’s next, Ringo’s my postman?

And believe me I will address all these issues before long…but for now…

Let’s just keep it to this.

Suppose it was Yoko.

Here’s how I see it going down: her limousine fails on Mermaid Avenue…sorry I mean Marpole Avenue of course…

…And her driver goes to find a can of gas.

But time’s ticking.

Yoko waits twenty minutes, and she’s getting anxious: this is Yoko Ono as directed by Martin Scorscese in “After Hours”…she hasn’t had sex in years…

Suddenly a kind of beat-up Toyota Corolla screeches to a halt beside her.

“YOKO? YOKO ONO?”

She says, carefully: “Yes.”

“WE’RE SUCH BIG FANS…!”

…

And so it ends up that the Corolla people end up lending Yoko their car…I mean, like Yoko’s gonna steal your Corolla? So it’s totally safe for them, but Yoko has to deal with the shit of driving once again…she honks at people, she wonders when and if it’s okay to yell obscenities…she’s a vibrant woman, but it’s been a long time since she’s driven. She hopes she doesn’t cause an accident. She’s tense. She wishes Sean or even Julian were here…they’d know what to do. John probably would’ve crashed the car by now and gotten out and gotten in a fistfight with the other driver over the wreckage…John stopped driving when he was about eighteen.

Whereas Yoko drove herself ’til about the age of twenty-four.

You can do this, Yoko.

That Peace Pole isn’t gonna bless itself. The universe just wants to know how much you care, is all. This is a test.

Come on, Yoko. Focus.

People are depending on you.

She just follows the car in front of her, carefully keeping two car-lengths. The car in front of her might at any time just plain PLOW into the ocean, and Yoko would follow…well, no one ever said trust was easy.

Trust…trust…

For weeks afterwards I watch the shipping news — see if some profoundly peaceful little old Japanese lady was found with her Corolla wrapped around an anchor…

Well, the universe tests all of us.

And I think it just may have tested me that day.

You know?

Not Wanted On The Podium

More Olympics?

Yes, more:  as even our city’s crappiest paper reports that work is underway to give municipal police forces the power to enter people’s homes and remove offending signs from their windows.

Seriously:  don’t have the Olympics to your town.  They’re a lousy houseguest.

Don’t Worry, The Process Is Painless

Tonight, Internet, I saw a Visa commercial starring Morgan Freeman’s voice, extolling the nigh-celestial virtues of the magnificent human triumph of spirit that is the Olympics. In it, he suggests that the Olympics — my Olympics, unfortunately — will “bring everyone everywhere together.”

I think that’s what he says.

I could be wrong — just flying off the handle again, as with the Intrawest news. (I made a spelling error or two there as well — will have to go back and correct it…)

But then again, I really don’t think I am wrong, or flying off the handle…

…Because this really has reached the level of brutal self-parody now, hasn’t it? Christ, I feel like I’m watching Bob Roberts — or should that be Touched By An Angel? I mean what is it, this Olympics thing? Tonight I have written, erased, rewritten and re-erased more words than I care to think about, trying to get to The Place Of Okay about Morgan Freeman coming along to stick his thumb in my eye about how much I should be on my knees in REVERENT AWE before the mighty O…and it’s still not working. I told you before about how every asshole with a J-school certificate from the local community colleges around here tried to prove that the Olympics is a democratizing force while the Beijing Olympics were going on…never have so many of the unqualified preached to the converted so self-servingly! And I think I told you, too, about our Attorney-General swearing up and down that every single economist in the world agrees hosting the Olympics is a Good Thing…

What I am saying is: it’s getting very uncomfortable around here. There’s a spirit of coercion in the air.

So where you might see Morgan Freeman collecting a paycheque, what I see is something different.

I see them coming at me again.

Recently, our beloved provincial government allowed as how it might be a good idea to get a law in place that allows the Vancouver Police to take homeless people off the streets in bad weather. And of course, we’re not stupid. But we don’t talk a whole lot about that.

We KNOW where it’s coming from. And I mean know: I mean there’s no doubt. Everybody knows. So nobody says it. Well, who would they say it to? Why would they bother?

Who could they find, who isn’t already 100% aware of it?

The problem is interesting, though: because the short form of the reason why we’ve got so many people living on the street here, is that we’ve systematically removed every other place for them to be. It’s taken, oh, about twenty-five years or so to do it…but we did it, folks! And now the local paper runs fascinatingly pointless series about “How To Fix The Downtown East Side”…because we may be a small city, but we’ve got people shooting up outside the police station, so ha ha take that, Detroit…!

…When of course everyone already knows how to “fix” it, and we don’t talk about that either.

God, I really wish I knew what they do about homeless people and winter in Winnipeg, you know? I mean that place is cold: if you’re sleeping rough in Winnipeg in the winter, you’re in a Jack London story I think…it isn’t notional, it isn’t probable, you’re pretty much going to die. Am I right, Winnipeggers, Winnipegosians, whatever you’re calling yourselves this week?

So, how do you guys deal with it?

In Vancouver, we don’t do much. There are shelters, but not enough of them; I’ve seen people I pretty much knew were going to die from the cold in winter, the needle in summer, and pretty much in jig time too if they didn’t catch some sort of break or other…and I don’t have any idea what happened to most of them…

I figure you guys must do more: sort of like that story about Churchill I heard, about how no one’s allowed to lock their front doors because, fuck, what if someone was walking down the street and ran into a fucking polar bear? If the house nearest to them has locked their front door, they’re dead, end of story, that’s all, lights out. Right?

But, sorry, I guess we weren’t talking about polar bears. We were talking about the Olympics, and how it’s turning my heart to sugar, my soul to rainbows, and my brains to shit…

Or anyway apparently that’s the plan…

Except that another thing everybody knows about, is that the Olympics isn’t really any good for any of the shit they say it’s good for. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I’ll treasure those memories of when I loved watching the Olympics for as long as I live — when I was a kid I thought they were very meaningful, and then even when I got old enough to see that the fruit was more than half-rotten I still liked watching them…I have friends who’ve been Olympic athletes, friends who’ve been Olympic broadcasters, I think the Olympics is a great idea in fact…!

But it’s only as that idea, that it’s any fucking good for anything under the sun anyway. And that idea’s not this one, any longer. It’s pretty plain. I swear, the vague nondenominational piety that Visa and Morgan Freeman squeeze into this thing like the filling into a Twinkie is insulting on religious grounds as well as nutritional ones…any way you slice it, either they’re trying to give you religion you don’t have, or they’re cheapening the religion you’ve got, and you know just as an aside, you know what the Olympics is really, really not? It’s not that WWI story about Christmas and the soccer game with the helmet, and then they all go back to shooting one another. Really, it isn’t that. That’s how they sell it, but that’s not what it is. There’s no divine grace in the Olympics, no miracles, no redemption…well, what would be the point of having the damn thing if there was? There is no piety in the Olympics, it isn’t a fucking church!

Hell, I’m not even religious, man!

Which is why I really resent that in my city, piety about the Olympics is as compulsory as piety in church. Privately nobody believes; publicly everyone has to make a great show. “Bring everyone, everywhere, together”? Jesus Christ, I’ve never heard lying so shameless, Visa And Morgan Freeman! Seriously, how the fuck do you sleep at night?

How is what my provincial government wants to do any different from what the Chinese government wanted to do?

Oh, you better believe we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about it because everybody already knows. And you may think that sounds like some basic off-the-rack teenage turtleneck denouncing of the Man, if you like…hey, because you’d be right! That is what it sounds like! That’s exactly what it sounds like!

Just, not what it is. Because it isn’t off-the-rack at all, it’s hand-tailored, every thread and stitch of it. And so I’m not writing this to convince anybody of anything they don’t already believe.

No.

I’m only writing this to tell somebody out there, anybody who would like to know, really, or who hasn’t heard…that, Jesus, but you really do feel it, eh? This ground I’m walking over, it’s intensely compromised, I did not expect it to be this way but it really is…it really is. And I’m implicated in it, whether I like it or not. For my city — for other cities it may be different — this is a hell of a testing ground. The Star Tribe is coming to earth here, touching down in my little window on the wilderness just a couple of months from now…and we are not a very big city, we are not a very old city, we are not a very ready city, for this kind of exposure to the world’s bitter, changing winds, and something fairly wicked this way coming. Morgan Freeman and Visa are busy telling me, through their late night ionospheric transmissions, that not only will it be great and good, but it’ll be my ticket to be part of Glory, to be a part of the ennobling of the human spirit…but I swear to God this is already the WORST Hollywood movie of that type that I have EVER SEEN, and in the end I may have to eat it, but I don’t have to smile about it, and I refuse to be softened up about it. And I kind of wonder if the CBC will even bother playing “The Bishops’ Wife” this Christmas…

Because, well…

It’d seem a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t it?

MAN, I’ve always loved the Olympics. Especially the Winter Olympics. But that was before I knew that in order to love it I also had to believe that it will bring everyone, everywhere, together.

And it won’t.  And they shouldn’t say it will.

And I’m really pissed at Morgan Freeman right now.

And I guess that’s my story.

Control Is An Illusion

AND THUS I REVISE.

So here’s the thing: somewhat suspiciously in the wake of Natasha Richardson’s tragic accident, Intrawest resorts have made a couple rules about helmets and skiing. To be fair, if these rules had been in place when poor Ms. Richardson had taken that fateful spill, she would not have been covered by them — she quite likely would not have been wearing a helmet, and so she still would’ve died. So, Intrawest says these rules aren’t because of her — but y’know, maybe they partly are. And, I guess, maybe they’re not.

And it really doesn’t matter anyway.

Because here is a thing that we all should know: that most of the mechanisms of control that take the form of “safety regulations” are for our peace of mind, not our peace of body. Essentially, they’re our excuses: and if anybody is interested in reading a great BIG long number of well-reasoned screeds on this very subject, my friend Bentguy gets like Felix Unger with the fettuchini about it on the regular…he’s also famous for calling up his daughter’s school principal and saying “we’re atheists…so if she comes home talking about the Baby Jesus you can expect my Charter rights to be giving you your next prostate exam…”

But if you want the shorter version, here it is: that the only safety precaution that’s ever had a good record is the one called “knowing what you’re doing”. Me, for example: grew up on boats. Grew up on skis, too, for that matter. Recently I conceived the idea of buying a sailboat and living on it (a good rule of thumb is that boats cost about a thousand dollars a foot…except sailboats can easily be found for a tenth that price, because the divorce rate keeps sailboat prices depressed, it may sound a little ugly but it’s a fact of life), and a friend of mine said “well, that sounds kind of dangerous”. I explained to her that she was what Long John Silver would call a landlubber, and so for her it would be very dangerous indeed…but I’m safer in a sailboat than I am in a car, because I grok boats on a deep cellular level.

And I grok skis the same way, but I’m not for one moment prepared to claim that boating and skiing aren’t both dangerous activities, because they absolutely are. They ABSOLUTELY are. But then so is climbing a set of stairs; in fact if you do the actuarial tables you’ll find that stairs are the most dangerous things in the whole universe.

Which is a bit odd: because, shouldn’t cars be the most dangerous things in the universe?

Of course, they should be. And they would be, were it not that we take such incredible care to educate our children in the matter of alertness to cars. Oh, Bloggers, this could easily be a very large and very digressive post, but since I am just fixing something I shat out the other night in a paroxysm of Scotch (other things from that night may not be so fixable), that will all have to wait for a Part Two…and I did promise you the short version, so suffice it to say that the urban environment is a very finely-tuned one, much more finely-tuned than we ordinarily give it credit for…and it requires a lot of attention.

Stairs enjoy their prodigious kill-rate because we don’t pay attention to them, you see.

Well, we can’t pay scrupulous attention to everything all the time, can we? We must have some mental peace now and then anyway…and in our homes we relax our attention, because that’s what our homes are for. And THAT’s when the damn stairs get you!

And yet nothing can be done about it: because we bloody well need stairs, and also we desperately need times and places in which we do not always have to have our attention tuned-up to potential danger.

But of course there are many activities, dangerous activities even, in which we can find such a time and a place, provided we know what we are doing…

…And skiing is one such activity. Boating’s another. Biking’s yet another.

Why?

What’s the difference?

I think, at just a little bit of a stretch, we could perhaps call it Ashby’s Law — you should click that link, by the way — which as Andrew tells us is all about having more available options, than the total number of things that can possibly go wrong. Now here is a funny thing about sailing, that perhaps explains its extreme historical efficacy: when the boat is under sail, there is really just a handful of things that can go wrong. And by God you can feel it, too: one of the great things about sailing is that it’s tremendously uncomplicated. I mean, so long as you know the things you’re supposed to know, so long as you’ve got the requisite skills, knowledge, and experience, then if you’ve got some wind in the sail YOU ARE GOOD…and what’s more you can know, with sure knowledge, at any given moment how good you are. And this “stability of mode” is where you find your relaxation, I believe — well, it really is no joke, even though it’s what people write crappy essays about on the back page of the Globe and Mail! You feel connected, independent, and capable. All kinds of things — ALL kinds of things! — get less abstract-feeling, and more real. Sailing is really very simple.

So is biking.

And so is skiing.

Well, skiing may be best of all, because there’s only about half-a-dozen total things that can go wrong, and unless two or three of them go wrong at the same time you can always move fast enough to put the other three behind you in a hurry. In sailing I intuit that there’s a critical threshold of things going wrong that is rarely but easily (if that makes any sense) reached, after which you’re basically throwing a Hail Mary. And if you can’t get wind in the sail at all…well, that’s what half the things that can go wrong are made possible by in the first place, that the worst thing that can happen to you is losing the ability to navigate. Engines solve the no-wind problem, for example, but then again having an engine on board magnifies the number of things that can possibly go wrong by about a factor of three.

Hey, I didn’t say it was a loose handful…

And yet it’s still a small system, so the addition of one more element to it is sufficient to deal with the engine-related problems. I speak here of the dinghy…

And of mathematics. Oops, sorry we’re going into a digression after all! Here is the rule of how to tell if you’re having a small gathering of close friends, or a party.

Three is a gathering of close friends.

Four’s a party.

But it’s a small party, and so it’s the best party.

Here’s how it works (I got this, not from any orthodox source like Stephen Leacock or my math teacher, but from Crazy Bucky Fuller): when you measure how many pairs that can be extracted from a certain number of…let’s say people in a living room…you find that if you have only a single person you have NO pairs, when you have two people you have ONE pair, and when you have three people you have THREE pairs.

But when you have four people you have SIX pairs.

Meaning that with the addition of one other person, the number of pairs DOUBLES.

It never happens again. Add another person to the living room and the number of pairs still increases, but it never DOUBLES again. Between the numbers three and four lies a huge leap into emergent complexity…but there’s just one leap. There’s just one opportunity to get MANY more options, than you had before.

And I said it was just an intuition. It is; I can’t prove it represents a cybernetic principle saying, perhaps, “up to a certain point you can increase your options vs. your circumstantial possibilities, but after a certain point that benefit of making the system bigger will at least decrease”…but, look, towing a dinghy’s just a good idea, okay?

But I guess the point is: there is NOTHING in this world that isn’t dangerous. HELMETS are dangerous. People don’t want to believe it, but it’s true: Jesus Christ, you really have to know what you’re about, when you’re messing with a helmet! Because they’re not magic, for God’s sake…!

They’re devices.

Warren Ellis had a great line, in Planetary: “a virus is just an instruction the operator doesn’t want.” How often I have reflected on his wise words, when one of my files has gotten itself deleted! Of course it didn’t “get itself” deleted at all…it’s just that the operator (me) was unfortunately insufficiently skilled to be in complete control of the machine.

The operator’s instruction, in other words, was the instruction the operator didn’t want.

The operator was the virus.

God, you can kill yourself gluing a piece of wood to another piece of wood (believe me)! Parents, teach your children.

And, perhaps more importantly: parents, determine whether a given safety feature or regulation will cause them to learn less. The human person is the best spellchecker, emergency warning system, online resource, heuristic algorithm…the best guesser, too. We’re the hidden source of order that brings the success rate (or survival rate) of our activities up over 50/50. Smart kids, skilled kids, mindful kids…those are safe kids.

Do I get close to it, Matthew?

On the water, I’ve been in a dire situation something like (I estimate) sixty times. Learning experiences, all — surviving number 10 meant I knew how to survive number 59. And I always did survive, because I was well-taught.

Control isn’t the answer.

(goes into Zen-master mode)

[SUDDEN CLAP!]

CONTROL IS AN ILLUSION!

(dives into water)