The Fan-Fic Nobody Knows

No, not mine. God no.

I refer to Jonathan Burns’ PKD/GKC mash-up, viewable here if you just scroll down through the comments. Go ahead and take a look. I’ll wait.

Back?

Good, wasn’t it?

Yes, I thought so too; in fact I think it’s very good. And it’s sort of got me thinking, since I decided to review that post today, that I’m fortunate enough to play host to quite a bit of this stuff, by Jonathan and others, tucked away in odd corners of blog and “Temp” directory. Which sort of seems a bit of a shame; because I’m the only one who gets to review it all with any regularity, I think, and a lot of it is very well worth reviewing. Thinking once again of what’s been lost in the comics world, when letters pages went the way of all flesh…and the zine culture that the mighty Internet (presumably) has subsumed like Zeus subsumed the many-headed monsters of myth. Of course once upon a time, as you know, all this stuff was linked underground in ways that were relatively easy to keep track of — Alter Ego and Let’s Level With Daredevil and Aardvark-Vanaheim and The Comics Journal, to just spit out a few obvious examples, formed a rich mushroom manure where talents took root and found out what kinds of seeds they were anyway…as, if I may make a strange comparison, the old days of television sponsored mile upon mile of home-produced film carrying demented kiddie shows, twisted sports-highlight reels, screwy chat programs and Bob Ross, all local and organic and seasonal delivered right to your door.

And I find myself thinking about Steve Gerber.

Here’s a thing I said to Sean W., not too long ago:

“I want a special “art” model printer sitting right here in my house. Screw e-books (although a good e-paper pad would be a wicked medium for CRAP comics, no question — but why’s everybody so worried about what’s going to happen to Marvel and DC, anyway?), I want to be able to set the thing on “Comic”, load in the staples and the paper, and have it come out at an approximate cost to me of somewhere between one and two bucks.

I would join a “Warren Ellis Digest Club” — twenty dollars a year, and I pay for the paper if I like things like that. Quarterly issues. Six comics in an issue, four by Warren, two by people he really likes and has taken under his umbrella. Let the comics pros work out how to stagger it so I’m always getting a weekly input to my notepad. “Ooooh, August, it’s Grant Morrison!” “Holy crap, it’s almost November, the new Warren Ellis is almost out!” Fuck it, I guess that’s not really a good idea — but I was just reading a Gerber interview, and like Kirby before him, he was telling the powers that be, look, forget the way you’ve done business up ’til now, the marketplace is changing, go where the money is, build a new readership, get off your ASS!” And whether you think he was right or wrong specifically (I do believe history has at least proven Kirby right — although he never mentioned anything about exclusively displaying SHIT graphic novels in bookstores (!)), I look at this Freakangels thing and I think “goodbye, old comics business model — this looks absolutely fucking AMAZING, now wean me off of this asinine monthly wait for new comics, let me get it and then do what I want with it (I’d like to print out copies for kids, myself; I’d like to own it and really OWN it — but let it cost me some money to print it! My decision!), and then give me some way of getting a respectable charge of money into Warren’s hands for it without feeling overextended or ripped-off, and…

GOODBYE, DIAMOND! GOODBYE, MARVEL AND DC!

Okay, lemme think about this. I love my LCS, and I don’t want it to suffer. Besides, if the LCS dies, where am I going to get my big-ass deluxe Milton Caniff portfolios? Where am I going to get my back issues of Fantastic Four or Coyote or Epicurus The Sage or Destroyer Duck? (You need to read Englehart and Ditko’s “The Djinn”, Sean) Something has to be done to make room for the people who’ve sweat blood for their obsession, here…Christ, and why doesn’t every store have a person in it who’s a comics blogger? Why doesn’t *every* store have a blog? Anyway the LCS is a “coolness” store now, and a nostalgia store too, as well as a pretty damn good secondhand bookstore and pop-culture toy store. But it isn’t enough.

How to make it enough?

Maybe it oughtta be like comics’ own Kinko’s. Can’t afford the fancy-ass comics printer? We’ve got one here; go nuts, kid. Got your ID off the website? But your Dad won’t spring for the ink? *Two bucks*, please. And no ads.

Or you can just buy the one with ads in it that we printed off for our own retail business under our commercial licence.

One buck.

Hey, buy a couple. The website address is inside the front cover.

I would dig the feel of a print-out, for certain things — paper still warm from the machine! Read that one on the floor, then print out the next one with your last two bucks! Ah, disposable comics again, the thrill of it.

But I should probably spend some time thinking about [it]. Horizontal screen dimensions? Imagine printing something in a non-standard comics-page size, it’d be like being Archaia. It’d be like buying something weird at the store. Damn, you could make it a collection of small murals, like they used to give kids when I was young…”

Of course it wouldn’t work, would it? Pie in the sky. But wait, how about a scoop of ice cream for that pie? Because the hilarious thing here is, it could work, just on the off-chance, but it would involve people in the computer industry creating a hardware and software package geared to the special needs of comics, and things like comics. Swiping liberally from conversations with Harvey, and (I think) a little bit from some Steven Grant columns…why the hell don’t we have comics made to fit our monitor screens? It’s my one complaint with Freakangels, that it includes very good concessions to the reality of reading it on your computer, but the scrolling part still isn’t FUN…so I’m thinking now, what would Hitchcock have made of these prevailing technological conditions, considering Dial M For Murder’s genesis as a 3D movie? And they do say it was the best 3D movie…

What would Kirby have made of it, or Ditko? Or Wally Wood?

Monitor screens (here comes Steven Grant, if memory serves) get wider and wider all the time. It’s letterbox stuff. It’s all moving towards more useful movie-viewing. But comics are still stuck in a page-style that can’t fully take advantage of that detail…reading things online, ripped and burnt (the comics, not me…well, okay, yes me), you move the mouse and the picture moves too, but it’s clumsy and annoying; whereas Hitchcock (and, I don’t doubt, Gerber) would’ve found a way to employ this necessity as a component of the art. Pages? The hell with pages, we’re talking screens, that’s what’s happening these days…

But no one is writing code, no one is building machines, for the comics business. Laughable to think anybody would! But hold on, not so laughable as all that…what would Gerber have said to Stan, if today was yesterday? “This is your chance to turn into a freakin’ computer company, buddy! Take the money and roll it over! Hire some geeks! Make something new! I just told a friend about how often comics come out these days, about how the monthly schedule has gone down the toilet and she gaped at me like I was from another planet! It’s over. Look, just imagine I’m Jerry Siegel for a second, just imagine I’m Sammy Clay…”

Okay, Steve never talked like that. But just imagine.

And then, of course, imagine Stan saying “no”.

Ha!

Of course we’re never going to have these things, if we don’t want them. You have no idea (or, maybe you do) how stupid I felt telling my friend “yeah, that’s right, X-Men comes out about five times a year or something, at odd intervals”…she was like “X-Men like the one with Patrick Stewart? Are they still making the movies, though?” Holy crap; it’s seriously over. The ship’s sinking. And yet where’s the replacement ship?

And: where are the replacement sailors?

How great would it be to have a little well-designed use-appropriate proper-sized digital paper comic-book e-book? These e-book and digital paper people are spending millions upon millions of dollars trying to replace the world’s most simple, useful, durable technology: the book. It will simply never work. It can’t work. It’s reinventing the wheel, only as a square or even rectangular wheel: and I know my fair share of people who love e-books and use them all the time, and tell me how great they are, but they are all working in the software industry, you know? Meanwhile, here’s how it would work with the comic-book reader I imagine, the C-Book: you’re going on a family vacation. You pay a subscription fee to Marvel or DC for the right to download a huge archive of comics into your little pad. Everything they’ve got, desirably. $29.95. You couldn’t even read all of it if you tried. One month later it all disappears.

And now you have something to hold over little Jimmy or Susie’s head if they misbehave. “Be nice, and I’ll renew the subscription. You liked that Green Lantern stuff? We’ll just get all the Green Lantern stuff. I’ll call them tomorrow if you go to bed now and no complaining.” That’s how Marvel and DC exploit their fully-owned properties. Subscriptions. And not just Marvel and DC: Astounding/Analog, F+SF, Black Mask, Ellery Queen…everybody who’s pulpy, who’s feeling the pinch, who has large intellectual-property assets they can’t mobilize cost-effectively. But in the right size, cheap for what you get, and too much to ever get through in one shot without making a full-time job of it…I don’t know, you think? Sell the archive again and again. Make it useful. Make it handy. Use what you’ve got. Use it repeatedly. $29.95 for all the crappy comics in the world, once a month.

I don’t know.

Is it, even slightly, a good idea?

What would Steve say?

Back to the mushroom manure: ah, comics blogs. How I love ‘em. But, it’s not quite the same thing, as the organic network of underground rivers that used to join up lettercols, conventions, fanzines, and other marginal publications to the “big time”, is it? All around us, under our feet, those streams are drying up: because they’re not streams anymore, they’re just a water table. They’re all generalized, all distributed; you can’t dip your bucket into ‘em, all you can do is drill your own well and suck up stuff pretty much at random from where it lives deep inside the gravel bed. We’ve got a vast community online, much bigger than the community we had before…but how the community communicates has changed. How long before the SF magazine as we know it dies? A single generation? Two? Print’s not going anywhere, but some of its markets sure are: and what will happen to it all if it just ends up running on applications that were really built for something else? People read a lot of different things, in a lot of different ways. Sometimes they read lying down in bed, and the book drops out of their hands. Sometimes they just pick up stuff that other people have left lying around. They read in the car; they read in the bathroom. Every reading experience is subject-specific. Specific subjects go with specific sites, and specific situations. Reading is architecture, partly, possibly: reading has a design component.

And, I’ll argue, so does writing. Jonathan’s PKD/GKC mashup belongs in an SF magazine, of course, but here I am sitting on top of a half-a-hundred little bits of inventiveness that don’t, necessarily…but do they belong on a blog, either? They get written on a blog, because the blog-format pulls ‘em out of people, and that’s…what’s the word…absolutely GREAT! But reading them is tricky. On LiveJournal (so I’m given to understand), fan-fic has found a real home: it’s a community of fan-fic, where the other blogging platforms really are not quite that. The inkspots are all over the walls, there, and you can get to them. So I’m told. But around here, so many brilliant thoughts get wallpapered over day-by-day as the date-headings change…so many sly thoughts sink beneath the calendar numbers without a trace, before you really even know they’re there…that I wonder sometimes if we’re doing this right. And no one’s after any of this stuff, except for us, and that doesn’t quite seem right either.

But what if it were otherwise?

The thing is, there’s fan-fic and there’s fan-fic, and the second kind is really just plain fic, if anyone could see it. Real fan-fic has a function over and above (or perhaps beneath and below) the joys of the reading experience — fan-fic is also fan communication, fan networking. Plain old fic is different: it craves audience rather than conversation. But very often it rises from the same spring, and so it’s hampered by not having a channel of its own to flow into: it gets mixed up with the other stuff. This isn’t really new, of course — people have always written for different reasons, wherever they’ve done the writing, and the struggle to find an intention-appropriate outlet should be familiar to most of us, people thrashing around community college courses, sending cartoons to music papers, photocopying, joining writing groups — doing anything they can to find their niche — so it’s not new, but the times are new, and they’re a-changin’. Steve said if he were twenty-five today, and doing comics, he’d be online all the way. Forget print. But how might he have done it exactly, I find myself wondering. How would he have Hitchcocked it up?

Recently I was in a restaurant, and happened to pick up a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that some nameless someone had left there. An embarrassing experience: it was a better paper than either of our two national dailies, and of course miles above the B.C. papers. I sat there staring at it, trying to figure out why. I mean, I don’t know how the PI stacks up to other papers in the States. Middle of the pack? Bottom end? Top of the heap? Anyway wherever it gets ranked, in my part of the world we don’t have a thing to touch it. And why not?

Talent is the answer, I think. Talented writers, and talented editors. It seems not to be a priority up here. And yet it must be the very simplest thing in the whole world: you’re running a newspaper, get some good writers. This is how Hearst became a magnate, how hockey became a national sport. Hire the good people.

However, you’ve got to find them first. In Hollywood (I’m reliably informed), the nature of pitching has changed: producers would rather say no than yes, rather be shown than show. But it isn’t just Hollywood. In Canada too, and no doubt all around the Western world, the meaning of “track record” has changed somewhat — changed to include fluency in the almighty jargon of Biz as a more vital component. I’m not tilting at windmills here, I’m just saying that’s how it is: many large and open organizational structures have calcified around here, over about the last hundred years. Not that “paddle your own canoe” wasn’t always good advice, because it was…however we still live with the times we’ve got. I send off envelopes to magazines, because it suits me and I can; but those magazines may not be around forever, or even for long. Publishing is changing. The record industry is changing. Comics are changing. Newspapers are changing. TV and movies too: they’re changing. New canoes, everywhere.

The canoeists stay pretty much the same, though.

So, what’s the answer, or to be more accurate what’s the problem? What’s the next step, after blogs with funny names and pseudonyms? This is the mushroom manure right here, but how might it best be spread around the garden? Well, I guess every blogger has to bash out a poorly-conceived manifesto with a lot of gaping holes in reasoning and uninformed rhetorical questions in it, sooner or later…and I guess this is mine, but maybe I can manage to say something sensible in it anyway, somehow. In these days, canoe paddles are probably easier to come by than they’ve ever been before, so that’s good. That’s great. And the new-model canoes are pretty swift too. But when (like me) you’ve been surrounded for some twenty years by folks trying to paint, trying to write, trying to act, trying to do their thing wherever and however they can, you do occasionally find it ironic that no matter how much the canoe situation improves, finding a stretch of open water to paddle around in seems a harder and more thankless task day by day. So I guess I’m saying: it could be otherwise, maybe.

Right now we’ve got a great new situation with regard to reviews and reviewers, out in blogland. We really are blessed. Online comic strips too. We’ve got a lot of humour, a lot of music, a lot of video, a lot of art, and a lot of news. Radio and print archives, even. For all these things, it is already a new Golden Age.

So what’s the next step?

How does one liberate The Fan-Fic Nobody Knows?

Idle ramblings from a procrastinating mind, Bloggers; for myself, I’ve got a pretty decent canoe-thing going on, so don’t worry about me. But sometimes I look at some of the little treasures that I’ve been fortunate enough to collect inside my computer, and I find myself thinking: “why am I the only person who’s seeing this?”

Oh no, it did turn into one of those damn poorly-thought-out manifesto thingies, didn’t it.

And everything I’m talking about here is probably well underway already, just not quite in the manner I imagine it ought to be.

Well, fine if it is! But I, at any rate, plan to start thinking about it a little more carefully!

Yours truly,

Robert Kirkman

What Watchmen Is Not About

Or, what it says it’s not about.

Go HERE.

What Watchmen Is About

For reasons too silly to go into here, I couldn’t post my reply to Tom’s question on The Comics Reporter (no link needed, I trust?), so I’ll post it here.

Watchmen is about what many good stories are about, especially many good noirish murder mysteries:  the struggle between free will and determinism.  Its innovation is to site this struggle in a world of “realistic” superheroes — that is, superheroes who are bound by pretty much the same limits of human reason and action that obtain in this, our very own real world.  Why or how would anyone become a “superhero” in a world like our own, Moore and Gibbons ask…and then they find an answer to that question.  How would the superhero function under the constraints we live under every day, they further ask…and then they answer that one too.  It’s actually very clever;  after all, every popular narrative depends on its larger-than-life characters to make it go…and this is just like that.  Only, it’s ridiculously like that.  So Watchmen’s about the collision of narratives, likened to the collision of particles, likened to the collision between dream and reality, likened to the collision between optimism and pessimism, likened to the collision between freedom and fate.

In other words, Watchmen’s about Time.

Hey, it’s right there in the title!

Anyway that’s what I think, right this minute.

Meme: My Favourite Post

Hola, Bloggers.  Let’s all look deep into the crystal ball for this one.  DEEEE-EEP….

Actually I don’t need to look all that deep.  Though there are many thoughtful, enlightening, and life-affirming posts out there in the time-drenched depths of Blogland, there’s not one that made me laugh my ass off like Olsen The Red.

But, as they say:  your mileage may vary.  Oh, especially since you should probably read this before reading Olsen The Red.  Yes, I forgot about that.  Read it.  Don’t be a clown:  I’m not jerking you around.  Invest the time.

Us folks who’ve been here for more than a year will happily wait.  (Um, more than a year’s enough, right?)

But what about YOU, reader?

What’s YOUR favourite blogpost of all time?

I tag those I know have blogs, to spread the word with:  new correspondent Andrew, our quiescent/futuristic oceanically Tom Swiftian RAB, I would love to know what Scipio’s all-time favourite blogpost is although he is one of (as Harvey once said) the Big Dogs and so may not read — but perhaps my partialness to Red Short-Haired Dachshunds and Two-Face may influence him maybe — see if I can lure David Golding out of hiding to execute one more deft appreciation…nah, he won’t come, but what about our ol’ pal Dave Fiore?  And oh no oh Lord that’s three full-on unlikely ones, we’ll need a powerful blogger to make up that shortfall and who else can it be but our own Fortress Keeper, and then of course Sean, that damn culture-vulture, well if he don’t do it, somebody else will…

And of course no meme can possibly be complete without inviting Fake Stan to weigh in…the most ever-lovin’ egregiously e-pinionated one of all!

I had an easy five close runners-up for this…a couple of whose authors are represented on the tagging list…but let’s face it, Jake blew it into the deep end, and then tackled it in a Kryptonian aqua-headlock and squeezed a mutant O. Henry ending out of it which he then clubbed to death and roasted under a fire under a double sun.  Pure inspiration.

Tag five, O singled-out ones.  This one may yield unanticipated benefits.  I have spoken.  Ya.  I mean Yea.  Or “Yo”…?

Damnit!

See you in the comments!

All Olympics Are Local

So…

I’m not watching the Olympics.

But, why not?  Since I was a child, I’ve loved the Olympics — and this year, nuthin’.  I mean I can’t even seem to bring myself to watch hot girls from my country dive, for heaven’s sake.  So what happened?

Well, the first thing that happened is that residents of Vancouver, myself included, voted “yes” to hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics — and that may have been a mistake.  I almost voted “no”, to tell you the truth;  and in the end it was only the knowledge that our Provincial politicians were going to fuck this city up out of all recognition anyway, that softened my stance.  I figured, if the Olympics are just an excuse to wreck the joint anyway, then it’s not like they’re the only excuse the powers-that-be will ever find…and so maybe we could get a goddamn safe highway to Whistler out of it at least, ya think?  Or maybe some kid in PoCo who wants to be a speed-skater could have a proper oval within a thousand miles of his home for once, to train on.

Of course I didn’t, for some reason, properly anticipate the terrible air of Olympics boosterism that would result from that “yes” vote — so much mind pollution!  But I could almost live with that anyway, to tell you the truth.  It’s something else — something only related to the mind pollution and the boosterism — that’s really turned me sour.  And it’s not quite China that’s done it, although China is surely the engine that’s driving the nausea along…rather it’s a very specific and noxious kind of politicization of the Olympics,  as a knock-on of the China situation, that’s kind of made me wish all Olympics everywhere would just plain piss off.

And here’s what it is, in a nutshell:

We’ve been bought.

Meaning, we’ve been dragged into the defence of the Olympics brand-name.  I don’t know what it’s like in other cities and countries, but here, with 2010 looming, everybody who can get a mike in front of their face is working overtime stacking ideological sandbags against the idea that it might occasionally be worthwhile thinking about the negative political impact of Olympics on their host countries.  And there is something phenomenally odious about how suddenly everybody in Vancouver with even a slight public profile feels unashamed about pretending to some kind of expertise in history and political science, just so they can say “we want our shot.”  I recall a feeling of rage at seeing Charmaine Crooks, once an Olympian herself, hold forth on how the Games are actually a force that promotes democracy (or at least does better than retarding it)…and I’m sorry, I don’t care what right-wing think-tanks say in the privacy of their consultations with Ministers, to publicly defend the Olympics on these tired old grounds of “trade promotes democracy”, a thesis left dramatically unproven through the twentieth century if you’d care to check the record-books, is indeed to politicize them…even as you rail against protestors’ attempts to do the same thing.  And that’s not only hypocritical, it’s demeaning to reasoned debate — these are political ideas, and as such they should come with the normal sort of warning labels.  “The views presented in this editorial are not necessarily those of the public broadcaster.”  “The Chair recognizes the Honourable Member from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.”  “Stuart Smalley is a caring nurturer with a certificate in Communications and Home Economics from a local community college, but he should not be considered widely-read, unless you count knowing the alphabet as being widely-read.”

I have heard so much from my talking heads, about how deeply unfair it is to politicize the Olympics, how it is essentially stupid to do so, as well as essentially kind of inhumane…

That that’s it, man:  I’ve checked out.  And yea, though the hammer is broken on the anvil, still the bullshit will go back to the money-men, who made it. I mean if somebody out there wanted me to see the Olympics as a bloated Oscars afterparty for Thatcherites, they couldn’t have picked a much more effective way of doing it.  This did all used to be about sports, on some level, didn’t it?  And maybe outside the borders of my city, it still is.  I hope so.  But here, it often seems to be just about propaganda, and nothing else.  Like, I’m expecting Christopher Nolan to reference the Olympics in the next Batman movie, kind of.  If ypou know what I mean.

I guess it all boils down to it being too uncomfortable looking at China, right now, for me to watch the Olympics.  Which usually I enjoy.  I guess what I’m saying is, this big Hall of Olympics Membership just has too many damn mirrors in it.  And, y’know…if I could just look at something else for a while, that’d be great.

Just ’til it’s over.

The Procrastination Dance

Ye Gods, is that the time? Jeepers, I should’ve been back hard at work three months ago…

But, fish gotta sing, birds gotta swim, and bills need to get paid…so one review, two comic scripts, three to five blog posts, uncounted e-mails and phone calls, four stories a book and goddamnit a play (a play? I must be out of my mind) have languished on the back burner while I rewrite a commission I already rewrote half a dozen times already, and all too infrequently chase the thing with some shovelling, rock-rolling, and brush-clearing. Oh well, they can’t all be perfect summers…

At least I’ve gotten some songwriting done, in amongst all that.

Really, some weeks I’m just happy if I can remember to floss…much less do the dishes…

But anyway here I sit, avoiding a) work and b) going to bed…so you might as well know what’s on my mind.

1. Tom Strong. I got the first three TPBs today and yesterday…and wow. How does he do it? It is just such a very very carefully intentional thing, it’s a project that totally shouldn’t work at all, but it does. I couldn’t possibly love Top Ten, LOEG, Promethea and Tomorrow Stories more (Jack B. Quick alone would be enough to make me a dedicated ABC-er for life, even if the rest were all crap), but Tom Strong is far and away one of the most insane things I have ever read. How could he possibly have made it work? By the start of the fifth issue, it really does seem like I’ve been reading these things for years and years, for God’s sake you know I think I might be able to get by in Ozu now. Well, it helps that Ozu pretty much functions on English grammar…but even so, what? WHAT?! You talk about a magic trick, well this is my favourite kind: the establishment of an addictively comfortable fictional universe, that reading about verges on participating in. If I weren’t still procrastinating, I might list a few of those uncannily attractive fictional universes from the worlds of publishing and film, for my own edification if not yours — because of course the interesting thing about them is that they don’t really have to be good, to sink their hooks into you, so what is it that special thing that they do, how does their compulsive attraction work? Well, Alan Moore knows, clearly. I thought Top Ten was fun. Top Ten was thrillingly awesome, but it can’t touch Tom Strong for fun. Fun! It’s like people almost forgot how to have it, or something! But damn it, there’s no mystery about this sort of thing, it’s just mainstream pop entertainment, for heaven’s sake we’ve been doing it for ages, surely it ought to be easy by now?

Nope, guess not. But boy, the ABC crew sure make it look that way.

Oh, well.

2. I can’t remember what I was going to say for 2., so here’s something else instead: Stanley Kubrick was a master of sound. Full Metal Jacket was on TV tonight, and since I always drop what I’m doing whenever I get a chance to see the thing — you should, too — I had occasion to be stunned once again by the authenticity of the sound in each scene. Of course FMJ can never be a documentary, and hey, it wasn’t intended to be one! But there are moments when double vision sets in, and you can kind of see out of one eye with documentary sight, while the other one takes in pictures of Matthew Modine and Adam Baldwin. The lines sound scripted, and then suddenly they don’t; well, it’s a favourite movie of mine, anyway. But Kubrick managed sound well in his movies, if anybody ever did: and if I had the time to set aside (but obviously I don’t) I’d screen my own SK film-fest and concentrate on the sound of each movie, just to see what he did differently from movie to movie, and what he did that was the same.

3. I really will have to make that list of Absorbo-Universes at some point…

4. I have been stuck on the ending of a short story — perhaps about four pages to go, if that — for two years. I’ve practically forgotten what it feels like to address and mail a manila envelope. In April I woke up one morning and walked straight to the computer, sat down and started bashing out improvements, sighed with pleasure at the success I was having, went and got a coffee, came back, sat down, resumed typing…and then the milkman visited, or something. Somebody called, and made me think about something else. I got hungry. I truly do not remember what happened, but it was just at that precise point when I needed ten minutes of concentration on How To Do It, and didn’t get it. However, having said that: who’s to blame? Recently I put in twelve hours of work on my commission, only to have my computer eat the work…but as I was explaining to my father, this isn’t really all that big a deal. Most of what we write could stand rewriting anyway, and word-selections are just word-selections, they’re not sacred or anything. And who forgets plot points? Just doesn’t happen; if you can forget plot-points, you should not be writing straight onto the page, you should be sitting in a corner with a scratch pad getting that stuff properly nailed-down. At least, that’s how I figure it. No, the dangerous stuff to lose are the tweaks: little changes made on third or sixth re-read, when you suddenly realize that, oh crap, should really not have gone “colon” there, that’s really clunky…and look here, you’ve said “continuously” when you really mean “continually”, which is even more ridiculous because what you should have said was intermittently. Duh! So you make all these changes, like three, four dozen of them. Then you change some of them back. Then you revert them again, then you decide to just kill that troublesome sentence entirely, and merge the ones before and after…and then you hit save, and then the computer explodes like you insulted its mother, and you lose all that stupid fiddly work…

Well. But that’s not really my problem with this story, either. The problem is that I have simply written something that hasn’t got an ending. It’s got everything else. It’s even got, I swear to God, a sequel. But an ending, no. The sequel has an ending, and it’s a dandy one. But not this thing. It just sort of hangs there, frozen in time. Awaiting the diligent application of, like, two hours decent labour.

But then so many other things awaiting just two hours labour as well, and one has to eat sometime.

Anyway that’s my confession. Congratulations! I feel better.

5. The Perseids are here. When I was a kid and used to go to summer camp, we did little two-day camping trips right at their peak, eschewing tents the better to watch the fireworks. I cannot recommend this activity too highly.

6. People seem to be really invested in Harvey Dent’s condition at the end of Dark Knight being permanent. I frankly do not understand this.

7. With all the online lotteries I’m winning, I’ve been thinking of using some of that money to buy up all the discount jewellry that people who can’t spell their own names correctly seem to have for sale. Either that or some viagkra or ciolis. After all I am running a little low.

8. The sun is about to come up. Time, I guess, to knit up the old ravelled sleeve of care; and concede that there will be no vacuuming today after all. Hooray! I hate vacuuming.

But in a way, hasn’t this post been a little bit like vacuuming?

‘Til tomorrow, then, Bloggers!

Allegory Revisited: The Dark Knight

And well, well, welly, well, well, isn’t that a nice bit of synchronicity? Here we were just talking about how to distinguish allegory from other stuff like it, and then along comes Dark Knight (I suppose I might as well go along with everybody else and call it “TDK”) to muddy the waters.

Or, actually…maybe not.

This is not going to be, as such, a movie review; however there may be spoilers anyway.

So what goes on here, that’s got everybody scratching so nervously at their elbows? Oh yes: Batman wiretaps, and the Joker blows up buildings — and vessels — with innocent people in them. So Batman does some stuff that George Bush has been known to do as well, and the Joker gets to be a stand-in for “terrorism” in general, all the way down from Osama Bin Laden to the jihadist hiding under your bed. By the way: BOO! Ha ha, bet I scared you.

Of course if it’s all intended as political allegory, then we’re pretty badly stuck. Because I think allegory requires a willingness to go all the way down the line of entwined reference to its bitter end, and TDK doesn’t offer us that: it only offers us a number of lengths which all together might go to the end, but won’t join up without some rather ugly and makeshift knotting…and even then, to make it to the end they’d have to sacrifice an empty space or two, and say “here’s where the rest of the rope would go, if we had any more rope.” For example: that imbecile at the WSJ can have his Bush panegyric in Gordon’s last speech, but only if he’s willing to overlook everything in the movie that undercuts its plausibility. And that’s an awful lot of undercutting to overlook! Everything from Batman’s failure to get good information through “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a double failure, since on the one hand angrily delivering a couple punches in the mouth before realizing the futility of it all doesn’t sum to torture no matter how you slice it, and on the other the Joker can’t be broken that way in any case, and torture or no torture still would give Batman unhelpful information — but more on that in a moment), to his willingness to create his own ad hoc system of checks and balances in the absence of a more legitimate regulation, to the fact that Batman can swoop into evil strongholds in other countries and pluck out exactly what he wants from them with chilling ease, like the very embodiment of Shock and Awe, like a scene straight out of Starship Troopers or (gak) the part of Spider-Man 3 where Peter saves Gwen…holy crap!…but then immediately finds that he cannot exert this matchless power without at once also creating an enemy that he can’t defeat by the mere exertion of unilateral action and Godlike ordnance/efficiency…

So, is that Bush-boosting? It seems not: cautionary tales about the unreflective use of power must sit rather poorly with old W.’s record, no matter who’s telling the story…and as for Shock and Awe being sufficient to skyhook up villains out of their fortresses in the first place, hey, remember that wicked scene in LotR where Frodo jams the Ring on Gollum’s finger and then boots the both of them into the volcano? “Happy…Birthday…To…YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” “Aieeeeeee…! It hates nasty George Bushes…hates them, hates them…aieeeee…!” U! S! A! Uh….

Yeah. So that part alone would pretty much give the Bush-as-Batman “allegory” a great big hyperironic FAIL. And then of course there are the counter-explanations that practically overcome this crap just by standing there: because forget Bush-as-Batman, it’s actually much easier to have Bush as Harvey, when Batman considers laying down his fidelity to Gotham’s ongoing process of healing because he believes in Harvey Dent…but is that belief not betrayed at the very beginning, is it not a form of self-deception, is Harvey not after all just a little less than the man he seems? How he loves to flip that consequence-free coin, the poor bastard: but then in two massive explosions its fatal irony finally, inevitably catches up with him, and all illusions of his casually charmed life drain away. Oh, and then he reacts to it all by becoming a deranged villain, but shhh don’t tell the kiddies…

Or even, Bush as the Joker? Don’t be too quick to dismiss the thought: huddled around a table, evil co-conspirators fearful of losing their antique business-as-usual privileges sponsor a man they don’t understand, who says he wants what they want but actually just wants to send a message…just as the goons in the masks are induced to dispose of each other one by one, the joke ends up not just on them, but on all of us. Well, no less a moral authority than Rachel tells us that Imperators become Caesars in the end…and some men do just want to watch the world burn, don’t they?

Ah, but games without rules are so easy to play, and that’s my point: because that none of this aggressive pattern-matching really holds up only makes the frustrated intimation of allegory more spine-shivery…Batman doesn’t torture the Joker, but the intimation is there, and Batman doesn’t exceed Bruce Wayne’s limits or break his one rule, but the intimation is there, and it’s an exceedingly uncomfortable one to see lodged in the film’s symbolic representative of conscience. Consequently, if the WSJ fool strains to see easy vindication for Bush’s extralegal activities in that fact, he rather misses what it is: because by skipping over the payoff, and passing up the opportunity to let its audience be purged of pity and fear one way or another, the brothers Nolan are clearly not pursuing much in the way of resolution for anybody, much less the backslapping kind. Allegory? If it truly does not go all the way to the end of the line, how can it be allegory? No matter how intensively the theme of escalation is explored, it isn’t just how aggressively the ingredients get whisked together that makes a cake, it’s what the ingredients are that counts. Um, to reverse-engineer a phrase. And not to suggest that this film isn’t consciously riffing on the post-9/11 Bush era, because it for damn sure is, but after sixty years of comics that danced around and around the sophomoric crypto-Platonism of Batman and the Joker being a matched pair of opposites, partaking of and creating one another, we should be thankful that the Nolans chose to give us topicality instead of allegory, because that’s the way they finally vitalize this dynamic, by playing on our anxieties enough to make us search the thing for allegorical justifications and/or answers…but not find ‘em, of course, unless we’re willing to join Harvey in the desperate binaries of tunnel-vision.

Kind of the point, really!

So we know where our friend in Wall Street is coming from, I guess. But, what about the rest of us? Is Batman “America”? Is the Joker “terrorism”? Is Gotham “Iraq”? Are you so sure? Careful, these interpretive schemes get more hostile to one another the more believable you choose to find them: because at a certain point in TDK, when all suggestions of restraint have exited the picture entirely (Shock and Awe!), a world is created in which Person A’s power can be used against him by Person B — because in a world without limits, power only conditions the environment, instead of controlling it. In other words power becomes everybody’s weapon, no matter who technically wields it, because it doesn’t even have to corrupt: so long as it connects. And this goes right back to the beginning, because this power isn’t even politics, just the shade of politics, the shell of politics, the trompe l’oeil of politics: note that in Batman Begins we were introduced to a Bruce Wayne who might have fallen out of Miller’s Year One, but actually didn’t, because instead of Batman and Gordon finding each other in a possibilistic environment of multiple options, BB’s Gotham offers us a more confined space in which Bruce Wayne is made emblematic of “his” city through acquiring a dual lineage that both reflects and expresses its own — light and dark, good and bad, historically entangled and psychologically conflicted, and it’s not just about the random gunman in the alley! The League of Shadows reaches up through the Sack of Rome all the way to Thomas Wayne and the reconstructive ideal of his modern era (how Dave Fiore must have shuddered — rightly — at its suggestion!); and after this ideal collapses, Bruce Wayne inherits the whole interlinked mess of powers and causes and consequences as habitat, a place where he must directly live. So his story is not just Gotham’s story too, but his personal psychological synthesis is identical with Gotham’s own one-and-only way out of the past…its only way out of a dismal predetermination. It’s a relatively simple story of large extrahuman forces that meet and contend within one man’s psyche in such a way that they cause him to look for answers outside it…and Gordon is the answer he’s driven to find, that weirdly untarnished half-pragmatist/half-idealist tightrope-walker, who somehow makes it all work. Again, Dave shudders! But the point of it all is that Bruce and Jim don’t just meet; they interlock. “There are good people here.” A small thing to say, but containing a whole world of implication: he might have said (to Gordon, not R’as) “you complete me.” So the salvation of Gotham is at once psychological and physical both, at once about Bruce Wayne, Gotham City, and everyone else in the story who seems the least bit nice…or conflicted!…and the nature of the salvation is that it gives people a chance, to be better than they are. Hey, it’s both handy and dandy, ain’t it? But that’s only because it is not, and never was, an open environment; it’s just a bit of “as above, so below.” It’s all carefully conditioned, made up of forces that meet, match, and lock, to produce an integrated meaning.

So in a way, also…it’s really quite safe.

But, not for long. Because to finally integrate the contending forces of the psyche is always to render a new kind of power for the individual, and Bruce Wayne as the Spirit of Gotham can’t help but have it, so he can’t help but exercise it. But let’s all just breathe a prayer of thanks that when it finally came time to show how Batman deforms the world around him, and creates the Joker as a (swallows hard) mythological opposite, script, performance, and direction come together to make sure this is not a quasi-mystical Cosmic Necessity, so much as the simple, concrete tally of cause, effect, and agency. We all get to see how it happens, and ditch the goopy Gotterdammeristic crap in this instance even if unfortunately we do pick it up later for Gordon’s final speech. Short form: power conditions the environment, therefore to understand how the environment has been conditioned is to gain access to power. The Joker gives us powerful echoes of Rorschach, here: “your hands; my perspective.” (And more on that in a moment, too!) The chance to be more than what you are, given just one movie before, is now taken…and Lord, just look what happens when that shit goes down! Batman proves absolutely unstoppable, irresistible, with Godlike power…and so he is not stopped and not resisted, but something (from his perspective) far worse happens, which is the opposite of “being stopped”: he elicits a complementary force instead of a countervailing one — not an immovable object to his irresistibility, but yet another irresistibility.

All nice and neat, and handy and dandy, for sure…in the comics. But this is a movie, and more than that a movie deliberately (I take it) carefree about touching raw nerves. Untidy stuff! That power begets adversaries, that control is an illusion, that some sort of tarnishing is finally necessary, and you’ve only got so much time to figure out how that necessity might be negotiated. “You” meaning Batman, Gordon, Dent, etc., naturally..but also, though saying this sort of thing does, I admit, get a bit tiresome after a while…you, yes you, the audience member. Well, especially if you’re American. I’m not, so it’s not nearly as untidy for me as it is for you. I can sympathize with the Joker (if sympathize is the word I want) much more easily than you can, probably — or, um, at least not more complicatedly. Or…

You know, a thing that might be said here is that we may be just a little too used, in these days, to admiring the “integrity” of killers. I mean, maybe that’s a value that’s implicit in much of our popular entertainment, even as we strenuously reject the idea that we approve of it even perversely or occasionally (or accidentally) in real life. Ya think? And maybe we feel a little let down by our admired fictional killers of “integrity” because they are rarely (actually) honest enough characters to fully evidence the “integrity” we impute to them…and maybe, finally, that’s what makes them palatable to us, even as we despise them for it. Maybe? I mean, maybe it’s all a bit mixed-up, eh? That bit I said, there? A little mixed-up? And yet the filmgoing and TV-watching audience seems to want some very peculiar things from their thugs and villains, these days. Once upon a time, if you were playing Password and someone said “Satanic monster…?“, you might very well have instantly responded “Harry Lime!“, but those days do appear to be gone, as best I can make it out. Heck, Bill Maher lost a show for saying it. “V For Vendetta” reviewers were embarrassingly careful to point out that they did not believe it, or condone it…like anyone cared, but still they went to great lengths. However say this for Ledger’s Joker, he’s a killer with that exact kind of impolite integrity that overturns all the applecarts, and shoots the milkmaid, and then looks you right in the face and asks you what you think. A monster, to be sure. But honest, even if not in “a good way”. Eric Roberts, with his smarmy smile (and didn’t seeing him here fulfill some sort of expectation, weirdly enough?) may be contemptibly egoistic, but the Joker isn’t…and the referential scheme of the movie can’t fail to make us a little nervous about that fact. Oh no, are we about to go the way of Bill Maher? Funny: if these new Batman movies are about anything at all they’re about resisting external definitions… and here they do touch on allegory, finally, and not just in the way of the picture’s motto (“I believe that whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stranger“), but in the way of audience-relation: so what are we to feel, and whose vocabulary are we to use in talking about it? Or are the two the same, really. Or is there any difference anyway. Hey, don’t underestimate topicality, folks! It may not have the strategic heft of allegory, but it’s tactical, it moves fast, and it makes its point: by beggaring perspective, which beggaring, along with fear, is the Joker’s strongest weapon. And may I just drop in this tangential note, that for the life of me I can’t understand why you folks down there allow crucial words and ideas to be ceded so easily to your worser halves for alternate interpretation, as though allowing them conceptual room to maintain their own delusions was somehow serving your interests in opposing them? My favourite of these concessions up ’til now was the sneer-quoted “progressive”, so laughably nonsensical an expression anywhere outside the U.S., a word which simply translates as “I do not really understand what I am saying”…but I gotta admit, I’m loving the “Dark Knight as paean to Bush” thing even more. One could have a bit of fun with this…Bush is Harry Potter! No, wait, he’s Gandalf! No, Bruce Willis! Aw…

So many kinds of paint, to dash on that wall.

And let’s talk about the Bat-imitators, because they’re a source of anxiety too, pathetic stand-ins for the audience members themselves. Oh, we are deep into — just whisper its name — fascism here. Except, is that length of rope any longer, does it stretch any farther, than any oher length? Is Batman, is identity, making the environment worse, instead of better? But without Batman’s struggle for identity we’d all be dead, wouldn’t we? It’s a juvenile complaint, and it’s disposed of so easily…by the time the detonators are in the passengers’ hands, is anyone thinking of the Bat-groupies anymore?…because it’s a facile way of approaching that old comics standby: is Batman crazy? Is he a fascist?

Stupid questions, once the Joker comes around, and try that on for some allegory…

And are there some things in this movie that ought to make one gasp? No more than there are things in Robert Redford movies that ought to make one gasp. Or, in that old Denzel confection “Siege”? American films of the pre-9/11 era, stretching as far back as you’d like, weren’t prescient, they were simply observant: because these are now, and were then, and probably always will be in the future, the tensions that shape/threaten the country. If allegory is a way of reading, then TDK seems half-intent on making a mockery of the attempt to allegorize for such simple ends — of course the film is simple, it’s very simple, it is not complicated and it is not new…in its very beginning there’s a recognition of a sort of fictional-villain “business-as-usual”, that then gets blown: the criminal gang robs the bank, but who are the good guys? And if we don’t know who the good guys are, then who are the bad guys? You see it’s the simplest thing in the world, but the 9/11 anxiety makes it complicated, makes this extraordinarily simple thing hard to parse…makes it challenging for the viewer. “Your hands — my perspective.” So who’s locked up with whom, after all?

If I can well understand the Republican desire to neuter TDK’s more challenging messages (power makes its own adversaries, control is an illusion, etc.), I can just as easily understand the queasiness felt by those who’ve been fighting the far-right Republican crypto-coup attempts of the American government (okay, Canadian too) for the last twenty years to see the signifiers of social conscience adopt ethically-questionable methods. Now, we feel strongly, is not the time for this. But it’s as bad on one side as it is on the other: when the mobsters make common cause with the Joker, they end up repudiating the conventional rah-rah-ism of American “threat from outside” movies, where the enemy of my enemy is my friend and we are all Americans together deep down no matter our faults…but that’s just a lot of bushwah, this movie says. The Sopranos are exploded as easily as the Godfather films: none of these men, none of these attitudes, are protagonistic — they are well past their best-before date. Consider the comical irrelevance of Eric Roberts’ face-in-your-face smirk: good luck, bro. It’s all over. You just don’t have the jam to be a character in this drama.

Because there’s something else going on. And it’s maddeningly simple, it really is! Oh, the elbow-scratching and eye-wiping of the reviewers and the commentators, JESUS CHRIST! It’s simple; so simple that you just can’t see it. It is right there, but you are not looking at it, which in itself is a testament to the Nolans’ skill. Man, look how this all comes together: I said before that TDK was less lurid than Batman Begins, except of course I did not at that time mention the one spectacularly lurid element of TDK, which stands alone for a reason. So we can look at it, of course! But, did you not notice? No pain medication? No skin grafts? No nothing anymore! And did you never wonder, while watching the movie, why they didn’t save Harvey Dent for Batman Repeats? I’ve heard they intially toyed with the idea of realistic burn-scarring for Harvey (ye gods!) before deciding no, Jesus, that’s just too much, that’s a ticket to like an X rating or something (do they even still give those out?)…and of course they made exactly the right decision, because to see Harvey’s face for the first time — and for fuck’s sake pay attention now — is to fall into the uncanny valley like nobody’s business, to see it is to feel luridity take hold for real. It’s just like, I mean it is just like, Chesterton’s “The Napoleon Of Notting Hill” — the world fractures, fatally. Everything comes true. Everything comes undone. “What have you done with my humour?!” “I assure you, sir…I haven’t got it.” “Hahahahahahahaha…!” Good God, y’all…get with the program. Batman changes his mask, to “interrogate” the Joker, becomes less real, less human, less comprehensible…becomes black beady eyes in an inhumanly cramped face, becomes that thing that the Scarecrow saw…and holy jumpin’ catfish, is he the one who interrogates, in that scene? Because there’s only one guy answering any questions in it. Let me just say again that this is all super-simple stuff; this is all easy as vegetable pie. This, what we think we’ve been waiting for, because in this movie Batman changes to become that most horrifying of imaginary prospects to ever be made flesh…the superhero. Yeah: suddenly we are not dealing with Guy In Suit anymore, we are dealing with Masks Taking Over…and you can see the Joker loving it, as he creates the superheroic world in the real world, that creation that must shock, stun, scare, FREAK OUT. Oh, forget Watchmen, folks; this is Watchmen, when Batman goes into the Joker’s cell, when Harvey turns his face around in the hospital bed. This is the superhero movie as horror movie, when the four-colour images leap frighteningly to life all of a sudden. “Realistic” Bruce Wayne’s opposite is an Un-Person by the laws of cinema, and yet more a person, more a character, by that very lack; Bruce Wayne’s ascension to identification with his purpose and his place is unbalanced here in more ways than one, you know, and yet men do not see it…foolishly, because it is right there in front of their faces. Look at this Joker, actually look at him! He is capable of anything from any Batman comic there ever was. He could be a homicidal Bugs, if he wanted to: he could dress up like a girl bunny, and make that fit as easily with “realism” — that is to say, with historical entanglement and causal conditioning — as the grim 90s bullshit of cutting people’s faces to make them more like him, oh him, oh by cracky let’s all worship at the altar of him, wherein is located the understanding of him…

But: that action’s not so easy, thank God. Because this isn’t a comic. The man (and he is a man, the way Ledger plays him) blows up hospitals, too. And yet the mobsters never come, as they would in any other possible version of this movie, to Gordon for help, just like Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser pigeons just stop being on-scene even conceptually once Batman goes out the window to save Rachel. Let’s not clown around: the Joker doesn’t kill those people. That’s a whole different movie. Those people don’t die. But, just like the random mobsters, they don’t live, either. They’re just a cut-scene, and they don’t count. Look, look again, look: that scene is just a little cage for the main character dynamics, and once they go on out of it it isn’t even a cage anymore…isn’t even a broken-out-of cage, it simply ceases to exist, ceases ever to have existed. Super-simple stuff, I am telling you. It literally could not be any simpler.

But unfortunately, that’s just what the Joker says, in this movie: that it’s as simple as it is. So dare we look at things head-on, as they actually are, as they actually for real line up, in moviemaking simplicity? We fucking well dare not, you bastard. What, are you trying to get us all fucking killed, or something?

Oh: allegory!

And hey: that thing I mentioned before about the way Heath Ledger was sitting in the police station, when Gordon gets promoted? He was sitting like he was wearing clown shoes.

Even though he wasn’t. And what in the hell could be a more private joke than that?

I’ll tell you what’s a more private joke than that; and look out, because this isn’t allegory either.

America may become a “failed state.”

It could happen.

And thus, if I may be permitted a further digression, is it not an almost unbelievably fortunate happenstance, in light of the times, that Jack Kirby’s Fourth World is being re-issued now? Let’s all get down on our knees, and thank whatever Gods may be, for that! Because it’s a damn good corrective, and in fact we need one right now. Because, where were we? Arguing about whether or not the Joker stands for “terrorism”? Motherfucker, the Joker is right — this shit won’t stand up, no matter how you prop it up.

And thank your lucky stars it isn’t an allegory!

Because if it really was…well then we’d all be in for a real world o’ hurt, wouldn’t we?

Well, that’s all the disjointed thoughts I can scribble down for now, Bloggers. Hope it all added up to something!

And now you may return to your labours.

On Irons, And Being In Them

Midnight, and it just got freakin’ toxic in here.

I’ve never done well in mines.  I’m a canary:  put me in a low-ventilation environment and I go right down about an hour before anyone else knows anything is wrong.  Very often, they don’t think anything’s wrong at all, never go down themselves, never notice a blessed thing out of the ordinary.  But all you have to do is up my carbon dioxide intake a little and I get stomach cramps, break out in ferocious sweats, drop about fifteen IQ points, start looking for things to hit.  Toss some chemical fumes in there, varnishes, inks, whatever ya got…I turn green in minutes.  An odd thing for a smoker to say, but it’s true:  keep me off of mountaintops and out of subways, I need as much oxygen as I can lay my hands on at any given time, because when the air gets stale I wilt like flowers in a nature film.  Smog?  I’m useless in smog;  can’t tie my shoes.  Fresh paint?  Pass the respirator.  New parking garages?  Call for the helicopter.  I’m a basket case.  Just throw a blanket over me.  I’m done.

So, late this afternoon I got back to my apartment, which of necessity I’d left closed up for a couple weeks.  It’s a messy, dusty, muggy place, a big concrete shoebox facing side-on to the hot afternoon sun, and with all the windows closed it bakes while I’m away, bakes just like a sauna made out of ashtrays.  It needs airing out.

Fortunately, the windows all open, and I have a fan.

Problem solved in half an hour, ordinarily.

Not today.

Two floors below me, the windows have also been flung wide on somebody’s 850 square feet of freshly-Varathaned flooring, so the fumes don’t build up in her apartment.  No fear there;  over the last few hours I’m pretty sure I’ve sucked ‘em all into mine instead.  Oh, and it’s also about ninety degrees outside.  So it’s pretty much like being the first man on Venus, and I am seriously considering sleeping in the laundry room.

Now, what’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong with it, basically, is that fumes don’t make noise.  If they made noise I could wake this woman up right now (actually I couldn’t:  obviously her apartment lies vacant until it’s expelled its Venusian atmosphere, but in theory I could call someone), and scream bloody murder about what’s with all the goddamn noise? until somebody somehow, someway, had someone’s boot applied to they ass…and no one would bat an eyelash.  Yes, noise is something that it’s very easy to complain about — because no one can say they don’t hear it, you see.  Well, maybe Michael Palin.  But smell, odour, atmosphere…these things have a lot of plausible deniability to them.  I recall one horrifying day when I was started awake by an overpowering smell of incense emanating from my downstairs neighbours’ apartment, at seven in the morning.

I went down there.  Not to be a dick;  but holy fuck, when a smell’s so intense it wakes you from a sound sleep, it better be either coffee or bacon, you know?  But incense for breakfast…no.  So I go down there, shuddering with self-consciousness, and reluctantly BANG ON THE DOOR.  The guy comes out (of course it has to be a couple), I tell him the story, he basically demands to come up and smell for himself.  We get up to my place.  The smell is UNEARTHLY.  Quoth he:

“I don’t smell anything.  …Maybe a bit.”

With a fantastic effort of will, I refrain from escalating the situation to total war.  I want to, of course.  But my primary goal in all of this, I’ve decided, is simply to make sure the really very nice folks downstairs are given a decently comprehensible motivation to reduce the general smellitude of their apartment.  It’s not necessary for them to believe me right.  It’s not even necessary for them to think me a nice guy, or even sane.  Of course one would not like to be known as That Neighbour, but in order for me to get anything like reliable sleep in future it’s become plain that ONE of us has to be That Neighbour.  I’d rather it was him.  But he claims not to smell anything.  So it has to be me, instead.

I decide I can live with that.  Just that, and I’m obviously already there;  and so there’s no need for war.  No need for a philosophical discussion about trees falling in forests complete with raised voices and threats…uh, the discussion complete with raised voices and threats, I mean, although about the trees…well, obviously no one can be sure.  But anyway, my policy:  all I have to do is come across as weird. Then he can go downstairs and tell his girlfriend “that guy’s weird”, and presto my problem is very likely solved.  Fortunately I have a lot of experience with being taken for weird (hint:  the easiest way to do this is to be bothered by something no one else cares about), in fact I would say I’m well-suited to represent Canada at the Olympics if Weird ever becomes some sort of track event.

Of course much later it turns out that there were three separate sources of that incense-smell, with my neighbours’ morning meditation practices being just one of them.  Oh well;  gold medal, please.  Wherever you are, largely-blameless-on-that-occasion couple, you’ve got my partial apologies.

But the problem, i.e. that some irritants are such that they cannot even be measured by someone they don’t bother, remains.  A friend of mine is deathly allergic to fish, which means that everywhere he goes he must announce very very loudly that he is deathly allergic to fish, or people will serve him fish.  But the problem with this is that there are certain people in this world who simply do not believe that when a person makes such announcements it’s because they happen to be true…rather, they think the so-called allergic person is just trying to say they are somehow better, special, or more important than everybody else in the room.  People are usually not thinking about things, you see:  only reacting with a sort of conventional politeness to a magic medical formula.  But not everyone enjoys beings polite in the face of such formulae, and no doubt there are even people out there perverse enough to fake such things…and therefore there is a constant, if minor, danger that when my friend says “I AM DEATHLY ALLERGIC TO FISH SO I CANNOT EAT ANYTHING WITH FISH IN IT”, that someone will get their feathers ruffled by this and proceed to serve him fish anyway, only without telling him.  “Heh heh,” they would think, perhaps, “I don’t believe for a second that this pompous ass is allergic to fish, I happen to love fish myself, so I’m going to serve him fish and then when he tells me how delicious it was I’ll say HA HA IT’S FISH, and then he won’t act so big anymore…”

Aaaand cue the sirens.

Not that this has happened to anyone, that I know of.  But I wouldn’t exactly bet against it.

Sorry, where was I?

I mentioned that I’m a canary, right?

Jesus, I can feel myself getting stupider by the minute…

So about twenty minutes ago, a little breeze sprung up outside.  Good news!  Because the Varathane fumes are coming in here anyway, but if they could be so much as mixed with a little fresh air, then I could probably sleep.  But then ten minutes ago, the little breeze died down again, and now once again I am basically typing to keep from puking.  The laundry room is looking better and better.  Of course, you can’t go sleep in a laundry room when your apartment is filled with noxious fumes.  You can make prior arrangements to sleep elsewhere, and no one thinks you’re crazy.  But you cannot do anything drastic or last-minute or last-ditch about such things, or they will.  Think you’re crazy, that is.  If they, you know, catch you at it.

So…only six more hours ’til dawn, I guess.  And then an hour or two after that I can go outside and nap on the roof, and pretend I’m sunbathing, or something socially-acceptable like that.

Alternatively, another little wind could spring up.

Let’s just see which happens first.

You’re A Blockhead, George Lucas

Oh, man.

So I saw the TV ad for Clone Wars, and…whuzzat? Huh? Am I actually supposed to want to see this? Am I actually supposed to care? This is like the Star Wars ad version of McCain in the supermarket aisle, I just want to put my hands over my face while I figure out whether to laugh or cry. Or do both at the same time.

How could this have happened?

I know I’ve said it before, that it seems impossible for the same Lucas and Spielberg who made Raiders, to have made Temple Of Doom. It just doesn’t make sense: scratch half a millimeter beneath the surface and it becomes painfully obvious that the second movie has almost nothing in common with the first, in fact misses every mark that the first one hit, and by a mile. So what did they think they were doing? How could they have made such an awful series of mistakes? My own theory, reluctantly developed, is that they never understood what they were making with Raiders in the first place: they liked the adventure-serial trappings most of all, in other words they liked the bullshit…they thought it was supposed to be Lash LaRue, not Casablanca. The Casablanca thing was something they just fell into — just some unconscious theft, that seemed like it was on purpose at the time.

Temple Of Doom they made their way. And it stank.

Then with Last Crusade, they were probably (at last!) forced to concede that what we all thought made Raiders great, really was what made it great.

But that’s just my theory. A friend of mine has another:

He says, maybe they just don’t deserve their creative reputations at all.

He may be right: think of how the plot-problem to be solved in Return Of The Jedi was just about <i>exactly</i> the same one as had to be solved in Star Wars…and then think about me laughing my head off during Phantom Menace when I realized, with giddy punch-drunk glee, that the same well had been gone back to once again.

And now Clone Wars, which I have zero interest in seeing, like really zero — I mean, my God, who cares about any of that stuff, at this point? But I could see that Clone Wars exists, and never feel particularly moved to type anything about it, except for one thing.

And for those of you who haven’t seen the ad, I am not even joking: one character tells another character that they’ve “got to find a way to turn off the shield-generator!“

To which I say: really, George Lucas?

Really?

Again?

Seriously?

Is this what’s supposed to make me want to go out and see the movie, that there’s some kind of need to turn off the shield-generator? Can you really think of nothing else that might pique my interest, than that? Do you even realize how many shield-generators I’ve seen turned off, because of you? Boy, warfare in the Star Wars universe is really the simplest damn thing in the world, isn’t it? You get yourself a shield-generator. You station a couple of stormtroopers next to it, just enough to bring the IQ level in the room up to fifty. Then you pray the Jedi don’t show up. Damn, they showed up! Oh well, back to the drawing board…

These people are clearly not what you would call the sharpest spoons in the drawer. They do not seem to have many ideas. They do not seem particularly good at drawing adequate conclusions based on their experiences. Maybe, like their creator? There are things that Lucas and Spielberg and all their ilk do, and have done, extraordinarily well — and I will be addressing this in a near-future post — but giving me a break does not seem to be one of these things. But why oh why won’t you give me a break, George Lucas? What is this shit with the goddamn shield-generators anyway, what’s up with that, what does your shrink say about it, for Christ’s sake what is wrong with you?! No, I am not going to watch any more Jedis shut down any more shields or blow up any more battle-stations, I’m just not, why should I? The filmic universe that I found so tantalizing, suggestive, expressive, open, and free back in 1977 (I am beginning to suspect) was created mostly by your inability to make it your way from the beginning, and now that you can make it your way it seems you’re making it a lot smaller and more boring with every kick at the can you take. Or, should that be “with every kick at the football”? And who’s supposed to be taking those kicks, anyway?

Me?

No.

“We’ve got to find a way to turn off that shield-generator!” Indeed we do, George. So we can get into your house and steal your notebooks, and stop you from shovelling shit on what was, in all honesty, one of the imaginative treasures of my childhood.

But man, the imagination’s looking in pretty short supply now!

Yeesh. Totally ridiculous.