The Mystical Code Of The Vishanti Behooves Me…

…To admit that tonight I worked on songs, and under a heavy load of cheap beer (as you must do when you work on songs) and so therefore I did not produce the long-promised Mark Millar post.  But I assure my Internet peers that the Mark Millar post is coming…yea, it is coming, maybe the day after tomorrow…

But in the meantime, cogitate on this paradox:

Who are the three worst writers, all-time, of Captain America.  In his own mag, guest-starring someplace, in the Avengers…anywhere.  Who fucked Cap up the most tremendous ever.

I’ve got my three.

And entries that include the word “Kirby” will be summarily tossed out, by the way.  So don’t be a dumbass.

Well, Internet?  It’s a damn tricky question, I admit.  But it’s just about my only chance to get a day’s wiggle-room on that Mark Millar post.  So if you feel like being kind to me…then play along.

And if any ex-Cap scripters or artists are watching…come on guys, after Kirby and Steranko, we all know everybody else is third-rate.  No knock on the utility players.  But drawing Cap is special, yeah?  And writing him is special too.  And somebody has to be on the bottom.

Just a joke Internet game.

No true criticism intended.

In fact:  please play along.

One of my “worst Caps” is one of the most justly-lauded writers in all of comics.  Like, people are going to WHALE on me.

So, just because it’s fun, let’s all play.

I mean no one’s ever played this game before!

And it buys me some time.

Pigeons, Portents, And Procrastinations

Happy American Thanksgiving, folks! But since I already gave my thanks last month, let me do the opposite here: and instead offer up a couple of things — ideas, rather, not “things” — that I’m getting kind of tired of.

1. Hypertime. Oh comics bloggers, listen: I like Grant Morrison just as much as you do, but there’s a very good reason Hypertime didn’t catch on, and that’s because it’s not good for much. Who needs Hypertime, when it’s perfectly possible to tell a story without even bothering to touch on features of shared-universe continuity at all? This is the truth of the matter, you know: good stories are flexible and robust critters, well-inclined to adaptation, and they don’t need perfect set-up conditions to do their job. Only when the story is about set-up conditions, when the plot in fact turns on the set-up conditions, is it necessary to control said set-up conditions. “Every story is true.” Well…fine…but who cares? More accurately: what reason is there to care? The set of stories that cannot be told without an unexplained contradiction-by-fiat of previous stories, and which need telling, is probably an empty set. Stories about universes may need vast reconciling cosmological structures to make them plausible — or not! — but stories about characters within universes never do, unless the universe the stories are to take place in is so wildly incoherent that nothing the writer does is capable of forcing enough sense upon it, even for a limited time, that the telling of any story is possible. What’s Hypertime good for, really? Explaining Hawkman’s origin?

Well, I’ll believe that when I see it. Which means: I will never believe it.

2. The Joker wins/loses in The Dark Knight. You know, I’ve thought it over, and I just don’t see that it’s necessary to draw conclusions such as this. Is the Joker’s worldview repudiated by the decisions of the passengers on the ferries? Not necessarily. Must Batman betray his own ethical code in order to defeat the chaos his enemy causes? I don’t think he does. Is it all about 9/11 and the Patriot Act and Osama Bin Laden? Well, sure, okay…but at the same time, I see no reason to think that just because a movie refers to current events, it must also be construed as having giftwrapped their meanings for the viewer. More likely, its aim will have been to use these references analogically, the better to explicate its own themes — and I submit a good way to test whether this is indeed the case, would be to analyze the topical elements in this light, and see if you don’t come up with something more interesting than if you hadn’t. Remember V For Vendetta‘s topical references to current events, and how they made otherwise-responsible reviewers race each other to the protestation that although they may have enjoyed the film they could not condone terrorism? I thought then, as I think now, that any review of V that includes this (easy, compliant) protestation is not worth reading — just as I thought all the reviews of Tim Burton’s remake of Planet Of The Apes, that insisted on painting its original as a sly and zeitgeist-tapping political allegory of its times solely for the purpose of pointing out how the Burton version was not, weren’t worth reading either. Some of these reviews seemed in such a rush to compare Charlton Heston’s excellent scenery-chewing with Roddy McDowell, to his excellent marching with Martin Luther King, that I actually cut them out of the newspapers and collected them in a little Scrapbook Of Stupid that I kept under my pillow in those days…until, that is, it got too big for me to sleep on it comfortably. I mean really — what review of Burton’s movie could possibly benefit from exploding the social importance of Heston’s up to the top of the skies like that, in ways unrelated to simple word-count? It became painfully obviously that these POTA-Classic panegyrics existed only to compensate for the fact that reviewers not only had nothing to say about Burton’s remake, but next-to-nothing to say about its source material either. “I remember my girlfriend and I were living near the docks, in a little dingy apartment with no hot water — such days! such dreams! — when the word came down that Planet Of The Apes had been released. Oh, those hot summer nights we stayed up on the roof debating its sociopolitical significance, until the dawn’s bright eye opened to behold us making love, as the city’s pigeons, like so many portents, fluttered up into the new day that was rising all around us…

Burton’s version has better special effects, but can they ever replace those heady, idealistic days of youth, and the feelings stirred by them? ‘You’re immortal, Tiger,’, the soughing breezes of possibility seemed to whisper to us then. ‘How does it taste?’

How it tasted, indeed…”

Seriously, I used to have a whole scrapbook full of tripe like that. Unconscionable.

But V gave it a run for its money, I think: “let me first make one thing perfectly clear: in this reviewer’s opinion, the ends do not justify the means, and in a free country it is our God-given right to say so.” Yikes, man, get down off those battlements, you might get shot! “No! It is the duty of the press to inform the citizenry about the pressing issues of the day…!”

Pathetic.

These are the same folks who reviewed Matrix: Reloaded, almost to a man, as being “okay I guess…except for that bit at the end with the Architect, I mean really that was rather unsophisticated, just Coles Notes for Philosophy 101, yawn…tonic for the malaria, gin for the boredom darling…”

I may paraphrase slightly. But you’ve got to ask, what crazy acid-soaked community college did these fuckers attend, where Phil 101 looked anything like Neo’s audience with the Architect? “Plato believed in a world of Forms,” a professor intones…and a classroom full of trenchcoated Keanus in dark glasses alternately laughing, crying, shouting “Fuck You!” back at him…one response for every possible universe…

Never was such a class, obviously. What it means is: they didn’t understand what the hell the Architect was saying on first viewing — he talks kinda crazy rapid-fire style — and then they didn’t bother watching it again. But you can’t very well write “I dunno what the hell exactly happened there at the end” in a film review! Duh. So you say it’s “Philosophy 101″. But of course it isn’t at all like Philosophy 101, and anyway when did Philosophy 101 get so easy to disparage?

You disparage it, in the normal course of events, only if you didn’t do well in it.

And if you didn’t do well in Phil 100 either, you probably try to make it absolutely clear that you don’t endorse V’s method of sparking social change…like anyone’s asking you, but if you didn’t say that, then you wouldn’t have much to say at all, unless by some freak chance you’d read the comic. Right?

So at that point you fall back on your ability to miscall things, and try to dissuade others from seeing any further, either.

Anyway, back to Dark Knight: me, I liked it a whole lot, but then I sort of took it to be a Batman story, albeit one with a little extra dastardly spice. Of course I haven’t watched it a second time, yet; when I do, I’ll review it.

But I won’t ask any rhetorical questions about whether the Joker “won”! Or lost. Because I don’t think that’s really what it was about. As the Sufis say: “many a test has been failed because it was too ingenious”…

Let’s all try to bear that in mind!

3. If you keep buying bad comics, companies have no incentive to stop making them. Actually, if you stop buying bad comics, you give companies more incentive to keep making them: that incentive is known as fear. “Oh no, where did that buyer go? What happened? Oh well, guess we better concentrate on serving it more efficiently to the diehards — maybe we can even come up with a way of getting each of them to pay more.” In other words, bad comics are more profitable than good ones, in the current climate — speaking generally, of course — so as far as communicating with the companies about your preference for good material over bad, dropping a bad book doesn’t get that job done. Rather, it encourages them to try and keep the buyers who are left, once those who prefer the good stuff have gone. Because these folks, as I lately mentioned over at Mindless Ones, are clinging to driftwood: if you take away one piece of driftwood, they’re only going to cling harder to the pieces that remain. I mean, I left off reading Marvel comics years ago…and it took a bankruptcy to motivate them into trying to get me back. Oh, and then they dumped me again just as soon as they could.

Not buying bad comics, like doing good deeds, is of course its own reward; nor should we think of it as anything else. Because, you know, it isn’t! A boycott doesn’t do anything but crash companies, if the companies don’t know who’s boycotting them and why, and cannot convince them all to guarantee they’ll come back into the happy family of supplier/consumer. But, there is a way to get companies to concentrate on the good stuff, and not on the bad stuff, and this is by realizing that it isn’t companies who make the good stuff or the bad stuff, but creators.

So, first off: you need to help secure creators more rights, more freedoms, more benefits, more equity in the workplace — more economic clout. More of a voice, more of a say, in what happens to their work. This means you must be willing to side with the interests of creators over those of companies.

Then: you need to encourage a climate of responsible, intelligent, and uncompromising criticism. Praise the good stuff, and damn the bad stuff, and make the praising and damning worth paying attention to, make it worthy of respect. Less criticism always means more crap; suppression or marginalization or evasion of criticism always means somebody’s trying to pull what they know is a fast one. Did a creator you otherwise like and respect blatantly hack something out for the money, and do a third-rate job? Hammer them for it. That kind of thing. Demand better. Many writers and artists of the past produced astonishingly high-quality work while essentially working in sweatshop conditions — so why should modern creators get a pass? They shouldn’t. Similarly, many writers and artists of today produce astonishingly good work while essentially working in total obscurity, ignored by or unknown to fans who say they want “better” — and this shouldn’t happen, either.

Finally: create (if you can) a better and more educated fan community, that isn’t interested in bending over backwards to excuse the bad behaviour of companies, creators, or themselves either.

And then…maybe.

That’s if you care about, say, the average ongoing monthly being worth your three bucks.

But it isn’t “not buying bad books”. How wonderful it would be, if that’s all you had to do! But there’s only one reason not to buy a bad book, and that’s because it’s bad. And if that isn’t reason enough, then there’s already no hope for fixing Spider-Man or the Outsiders or whatever, and it’s time to move on.

4. I forget what 4. was.

If I remember, I’ll put it in the comments.

And now back to trying not to procrastinate!

Some Things You Don’t Even Really Need To Think About

This is one of them.

Breach-Birth Comics

Consider this a preface as well. And yes I know I’ve misspelled it, but…

What comics exploded the flood wall of your comics status quo, and brought in a new expectation?

Give me five, and I’ll give you five. Actually I’ll give you my five first. Actually I’ll give you ten, and you give me ten. But first, five.

Okay, I was raised on Tintin, Asterix, Mad, and the Freak Brothers, as well as Marvel Team-Up, Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange, and Not Brand Ecch. So it isn’t like I didn’t know there was something else out there. But what I’m saying is, there’s a unique tension in American superhero comics. And here’s what blew that shit up into the stratosphere for me, bit by precious bit:

1. Deathlok, by Rich Buckler

2. Cerebus, by Sim and Gerhard

3. American Flagg, by Howard Chaykin

4. The One, by Rick Veitch

5. Shade, The Changing Man, by Ditko and Fleisher

That’s pretty much chronological. Then came:

6. Coyote, by Englehart and Leialoha

7. The Price, by Jim Starlin

8. Paradax, by Milligan and I-Don’t-Know-Who [EDIT: I am reminded that this was Brendan McCarthy, and also that I'm an idiot]

9. 100 Rooms, by Jaime

10. Ed The Happy Clown, by Chester Brown

And after that I was done for. Got ahold of some Eightball, a little Maggie The Mechanic, then Hate came along…

Started reading The Comics Journal...

When Ed started buying Sandman and Watchmen, I just about turned my nose up at them both. Then he threatened to punch me in the face if I didn’t read them. And I think he was serious.

Let this be a lesson: the comics buddy system is to be encouraged.

We’ll do this again, Bloggers; only next time it will be “Intuition Comics”.

Intuition that there may be something else out there.

Those were interesting comics!

But these ones are the ones just after that.

So let’s have yours. Because I really don’t know. When did you — or, did you ever, to this date — discover that there might be other ways to apply genre conventions than just to uphold genre conventions? And did you subsequently bail out, or stay in. You see, I bailed out; Ed stayed in, and dragged me back in. I think he might have been a little bit pissed at me there, for a year or two!

But it was his own fault: he started shoving me Fanta titles in the first place. “Where’s Batman?” I mewled at first.

“Fuck your Batman,” he told me sternly. “Read this Lloyd Llewellen rant. He’s the new Batman.”

Ah, the days past intuition…

My place in the gallery of history signed with an “X”, Jeeves.

Kali Yuga, Kali Yuga Men Have Named You…

Another comics post, prefatory to the big Mark Millar-centred post which, seriously, is coming any day now.

Let’s talk about my favourite experiment in the world of Big Two comics: DC’s post-Crisis era.

I’ve talked about this before, of course. I believe, in referring to it, I might even have let slip the words “God Bless Chaos”. Really, this was the most exciting era of “grown-up” superhero comics that there ever was — until the vision failed.

Quick overview, for new readers (ha ha) of the vision:

Post-Crisis, as Grant Morrison informed us in Animal Man, all the paper-thin fantasias of magic rings, animal powers, glowing meteorites, and impossible physics, that had previously existed as an infinite number of soap-bubble-skin universes over a yawning higher-dimensional space of “as if”, suddenly got agglomerated into one universe, and as a result that universe acquired a much greater logical density. Things that previously didn’t make sense, except it didn’t matter, became things that didn’t make sense except it did matter. And as a result, all the characters got thrown into a tizzy: they couldn’t know what was happening to them, as all their past histories became consolidated, rationalized, and realigned — but they (at least some of them) suspected that something was happening to them.

And from his throne in the Dreaming, Morpheus saw it all…or did he?

I just want to say, I don’t know if Neil does these things on purpose, or not! He has never presented himself as a Master Planner! But consider Crisis in the context of Destruction seeking freedom, if you will…in the context of Delight’s turn towards Delerium. I know, I know: there’s already a story behind Delight’s transformation.

But just consider it, for a moment.

Anyway if Morpheus doesn’t see it all, at least he sees a great deal of it. But beyond the Endless, there’s another group of demi-gods who definitely do and did see it all:

Whose names are: the readers of DC Comics.

The post-Crisis heroes don’t know about the Crisis: they don’t remember it as it was. Their memories have been altered to conform to the post-Crisis reality, because they’re in the post-Crisis reality. They know Barry Allen is dead, but they don’t know what he’s become. They know Buddy Baker is going through some shit, but they don’t know what it is. They think they know their own history, but they don’t know it.

Only we know it.

And thus there are clues, clues everywhere, to what the new DC universe looks like, and what its new structure is, and how it works, that only we can see.

You want metatextual stuff? You want a self-aware universe?

In the immediate post-Crisis universe, we were that self-awareness. We were that metatextuality. And for that reason the universe in which the DC superheroes resided became a frighteningly open and spontaneous one (if they had only known it), because we were making up our minds, page by page and book by book, about just what it was going to be: writers, artists, editors, and readers all together. There were suggestions of order everywhere, but they no longer emanated from a spot — any spot — inside the DCU. Instead, they radiated in from outside it, raining on it, hailing on it. And so it was a multi-centred seeding pattern of past causality, yet to be established; it was chaotic, and rather beautiful. It was a reinvention, it was an ascension, it was an explosion — it was an ecology of comics continuity, in which different impulses of order sometimes conflicted, and in doing so inflated the “skin” of the new universe, making new space and new niches that had never been seen before. And yet which had “always” been there, instantly as soon as they emerged from primal nothingness.

Great, eh?

But, it did not last. “The Devil howling ‘ho!/ Let Einstein be!’/ Restored the status quo”…if you catch my drift.

(And if any of you Bloggers happen to know where in the hell that line comes from, I’d be much obliged if you could fill me in…somehow I imagine it is from a Poul Andersen book…)

Eventually there was an idea, in DC Editorial, that matters couldn’t stand thus. Too many faultlines out of Crisis; too much confusion.

Zero Hour was born, to do away with this rephrasing of static multiplicity into a complex and growing singularity…to do away with narrative uncertainty, but also the feedback that fed it. It was a “nuke ‘em all from orbit!” strategy…to block the access of the intercommunicating parts of this new universe: you, and me, and the guy writing the book, and the artists bringing it to life, and the editors riding herd on it all with partial success…

That all had to go. From orbit!

And, it went.

Except!

It didn’t.

Because the Crisis is still the cause of Zero Hour’s “regularized” DC universe…everything in the post-ZH DCU flows from the Crisis, inevitably. The Crisis is the substratum of the DCU, inevitably. And it is still the time of the Kali Yuga! Therefore, one might have predicted, all the ZH fixes for Chaos would have done is to make the scary expansion of spontaneity, which had prior to this been governed by the implicate scheme of the “secret origins” that only Harbinger and the readers/writers/artists/editors knew…well, ungoverned.

Crazy, neurotic, non-self-knowing, promiscuous, infectious…bad.

That’s exactly what happened!

There was no order (which is to say: no disorder) shaping things anymore!

Except!

There still was.

Welcome to the post-Infinite Crisis DCU of about a year ago or so (if I’m not wrong): where for just a moment, Scipio’s mathematical description of what “the 52″ looks like held sway! I’m sorry, I can’t find the link right now…

I will plug it in later…I saved it in a bookmark…

And here was the victory of Order, the pushing-back of the Kali Yuga.

Um, wasn’t that we wanted?

It did not last…!

And now we are somewhere else. God knows where we’ll end up. Back in the immediate post-Crisis days? I hope so, but I don’t hope very hard. I don’t know if even Grant Morrison, author of the Yellow Aliens, first to see what a post-Crisis universe could be for, is quite up to the job of expanding this “skin” any further. This skin, it seems to me, is hardening at a great rate.

So, it’s Flex Mentallo vs. The Snowflake, right?!

A race against time.

If there is ever a Planetary #36, I hope it will tell the story of this story.

Little joke there.

But now let me blow your mind a little, gentle reader: because none of this is what I came here to talk about today.

I actually came here to talk about The Ultimates!

“Mark Millar”, remember?

I turned to Ed one day over a steaming pile of comics, and said: “you know who the traitor in The Ultimates is?”

He said: “No, please do tell me, oh mighty know-it-all-but-always-wrong one…”

Quoth I: “It’s the Ultimate Black Widow. Because that’s what she did back in 1966. She was a traitor. She fucked over Hawkeye.”

“Ah…!”

It was the whole appeal of the Ultimate line: you know what’s going to happen, you just don’t know how.

And now my point: this is how you catch a comics fan. You set a comics fan, to catch a comics fan. You make it a puzzle: we love puzzles. You make it a game! We loooove games.

You make it fun for itself, but you also make it an interactive game in which the comic-geek’s knowledge counts for something, and is rewarded by something. And that’s how you make money — that’s how you get people trying to move up the ladder of knowledge, which means buying back issues and repackaged content…that’s how you give the spender of $120.00 per month a way of feeling he/she’s gotten some bang for his/her buck/dollar.

It’s how you do online multiplayer games, in fact.

Fake Stan knows I’m right, because he knows how to move with the times. You gotta massage the fans. You’ve gotta make them fall in love with you, and your mysterious smile. What am I hiding, comics fans? What do I know, that you don’t know. Lean close, and I will whisper it in your ear. So long as, you know…you stay a Fearless Front-Facer.

This is the kind of thing that could save a beleaguered industry. Knowing who their fans are. Somewhere out there is a vast sea of fans-who-were, who could be again. Marvel and DC have both written those fans off as dead or dying. Marvel and DC have both made half-hearted gestures to reclaim them, only to find half-hearted gestures receive half-hearted gestures in response. Oh, hi.

Hey, hi.

Behind the status quo of pathological repetition lies the Crisis. The Kali Yuga provides surf. Some know how to catch the surf, but only for a minute: then they pose with their surfboards for a half an hour after. And then they go to the bar, and talk about surfing for another couple of hours, trying to pick up chicks.

And this may work, for them. But talking about surfing doesn’t get much surfing done. And we’re here to surf.

Or, to drown.

Or, to fuck off back to the hotel and wait for the phone call from the documentary crew.

The appeal of the Ultimate universe died. Was it for the same reason the appeal of the post-Crisis DCU died?

Well, you can’t surf in scruff.

Listen, I actually haven’t bought a comic that wasn’t written by Alan Moore or Eddie Campbell or Jack Kirby or Jeff Smith or Lee Falk or Walt Kelly or Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison or Los Bros Hernandez for nigh on three years…but I’ll tellya something, I WOULD.

If anyone knew what the hell I wanted, I would buy it from them for sure.

Although maybe it’s too late, at that. I’m learning webcomics. I’m buying what Sean Witzke and Sean Kleefeld and Tucker Stone and Jog advise, now. I may be your Akira, Big Two comics. This may all be over; it may be too late. I may have launched my evil plan twenty-five minutes ago.

I hear Messner-Loebs’ “Journey” is for sale again.

Did you know Uderzo’s new Asterix of a couple years ago sold like seven million copies in twenty-four hours?

Do you even know what business you’re in?

There’s a lot of money in this market. It’s like a movie-sized market, only steadier. But you can’t get to it, it seems. So Marvel and DC, I accuse you of having a death wish.

I accuse you, in the great Steve’s words, of not knowing how to Dance the Rattlesnake.

But I’ll give you some free advice, though you won’t like it.

Ready?

Editor-In-Chief Rick Veitch.

Okay, so maybe you don’t like that. But the time to try and hold back the tide was ten years ago.

Time to be someone else now.

This bubble’s about to burst.

Flashback! To “The Incredible Hulk…!”

Well, I saw it!

Man, that was kinda schizoid though, right?

I’d love to read Ed Norton’s unaltered script, because after seeing this, there are some things I just need to know, that I’m sure he covered.  Like, why in the heck is the Hulk so angry?  Huh?  I mean what’s the reason for it.  In Ang Lee’s movie, we got to see that Banner is just repressing all kinds of rage, and so an angry Hulk made sense there…but even that Hulk wasn’t as angry as this Hulk.

Why so angry?

I’m just assuming it was Norton’s script that introduced the stray elements that hinted at a larger backstory.  Bruce and Betty dropping a shitload of acid in their undergraduate days…uh…WHAT?  I mean, very interesting I’m sure, nice detail, but…WHAT?  See, there’s something in that, obviously.  There has to be.  There can’t not be.

Because, Bruce Banner as played by Ed Norton just doesn’t seem like a very angry guy!  And he doesn’t seem like a milksop either.  He doesn’t seem angry or anti-angry, he just seems like a regular joe.

So, how do you get the Hulk, out of that?

You do have to get it from somewhere. After all, we get the Abomination from somewhere, don’t we?  We get the Leader from somewhere, too.  So why doesn’t the Hulk come from somewhere?

In many ways it’s a fascinating movie.  So much is missing, so much has been replaced.  Just compare the King Kong-esque scene with Betty and the Hulk in the cave, to the end of the movie with its sentimental posturing.  Think about Lou Ferrigno’s voice growling “Leave me alone” — unexpected, and a little jarring perhaps, but good!  Good for Lou.  But now think about that awful “Hulk smash!” bit, I mean…how does he even know he’s called the Hulk?

Some gaps are glaring.  What was Betty’s “primer”?  How could Bruce have been so foolish as to belt himself with gamma rays in the first place?  Why would he?  What were Bruce and Betty up to, in that lab?  When Betty says that she thinks “it knew me”, and Bruce cuts her off — there’s something there, but like everything else, we don’t get to see it.

The “Lonely Man” stuff, the travelogue…it’s interesting, don’t you think?  Banner in torn pants hunched against a tree in a market:  it’s almost like somebody read the comics, or something, it’s like a Barry Windsor-Smith picture.  And I don’t even know what the fahvela opening was all about, all I could think while watching it was “how can some crappy fight between CGI monsters compare to this?”  And yet each of these scenes is oddly treated — except for the fahvela, they’re all truncated, while the opening scene goes gloriously on and on.  And this is the second time I’ve wished I’d seen a movie in the theatre when I thought I might be able to wait to see it on DVD…the first was Iron Man, for the crazy rocketeering sequences, and the second was this, for the scenery.  Oh, the fights ended up being okay!  But there’s just one problem.

Who the hell is Bruce Banner?

This is just this close to the Hulk of my youth, the Wein/Trimpe ballcap-wearing Banner, and there are signs of it all over.  But, something’s still missing!

I wonder what it is.

The Crush Of Space And Time

So here I sit.  Avoiding introspection.  You may want to look away, Bloggers;  this isn’t about comics or movies or TV or any kind of pop culture, but there are nonetheless SPOILERS ahead.  And they won’t be very nice, or easy to swallow.

***

No, seriously:  this will not be fun reading.  It’s gonna be very personal.  And gloomy.  I’m not joking.

***

Well all right, if you must hang around…

***

Hi.

There’s a thing, I’ve learned, that distinguishes cancer survivors from cancer fatalities.

The first group has time enough to complete their course of treatment.  Whatever it happens to be, you know?  Wheat grass, Chinese teas, chemotherapy, whatever.  The distinguishing characteristic of cancer fatalities is that they do not get to complete this.  They get knocked on their ass…they have to switch horses…they get kicked out of the clinic…they run out of money…

They run out of time.

One way or another.

And so, it looks like my friend is getting very, very close to running out of time.  She is shaving slices off the particle horizon like it was a Pittsburgh ham;  she is this close to passing out of the observable universe altogether, even though she is not gone, not yet.  Basically there is just enough time for a miracle.  Kale juice.  Jesus, maybe.  Aliens with faster-than-light drive.  Fucking something.

Is it too late to hope for “spontaneous remission”?

The thing is, I don’t even know if it’s too late to hope for that.  No one can give me any odds on it.  I usually feel that my role in these things is to be the guy who stays stuck in denial until the very last second.  Hope?  Hope is springing up like rusty flowers every place I put my foot down, if you say nothing else for me at least you can say that. She is not out of time yet. Until she runs fully out of time, she will not be fully out of time.

Except I am told that there may be a time, maybe even soon, when she will not technically be out of time, but there will not be time enough for her to use that time, to get better.  Which amounts to the same thing, right?  Well, the sports fan in me says no, of course.

But even the sports fan in me is feeling the gradual crush of space and time right now.

And in fact the sports fan in me says “yes”, because I lied before.  Because sports fans may not be pessimists, but they’re keenly attuned to possibility.

It was different when she had months.  It was different when she had a month.

But now she is coming to the end of all the predictions that were ever made about her.  She has another tumour.  She didn’t tell me.  I kind of knew;  but, you never really know, until you know.

And I feel like I’m a month behind in thinking good, denial-laden thoughts about this tumour.  A month behind in cheering against it.  Listen, Bloggers, this is something I understand very well:  you always feel like it was you, somehow.  You always think it was somehow your fault. This is how human beings are wired.  It’s just how it is.  It’s part of grieving:  it’s the astral cord that connects what you feel, to what someone else goes through, to the body in the box.  It’s what makes it awkward to communicate, with someone who needs to talk to you or hold your hand another time before they go.  You feel responsible.

But you’re not, of course.

And I know enough not to make the mistake of believing what my brain cells feel about this.  But if she had told me the way things were, I would’ve strung up my hammock in her backyard regardless and lived with her for the last month, cooking on the Coleman stove.  And she would not have had a moment’s rest from me.  It would’ve been like observing your own funeral — something that we all fantasize about, but when it comes down to the brass tacks none of us would wish to do in reality.  I would’ve been a walking spectral cenotaph, to her, with big stone hands that just knock things over that she’s trying to stack up:  because not everybody is empowered to help with all things.

Pardon me, if you would;  I am using this blog to work out some temporary personal issues.

I beg your indulgence.

…Because not everybody is empowered to help with all things, yeah.  Sometimes the rusty flowers of hope are just weeds, uglifying the nice green lawn.  Sometimes big clumsy stone hands intrude.  And people can be effortful.  This is when we, most of us, rely on family:  when we need people around us who can know how not to get in the way when we’re trying to think about shit.  And I’m not family, so I can’t be there…so she didn’t tell me.  Well, she kind of almost told me, and I’ll be happy to take that as my epitaph, when I go…

But in the end, I am a lousy person to be around when you are trying to tidy up your affairs.  Because I tend to loom. Oh, very positively!

But it’s still looming.

You know, she’s one of the friends I made myself, all on my own, with no introductions or friends-in-common.  She just fell on me — or I fell on her — right out of the blue.

And, there aren’t that many of those people left, anymore!

But it has to be said, by somebody:  she might yet overrun all the predictions that have been made about her.  The particle horizon has still not swallowed her.  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  Nobody knows what’s going to happen.

However of course the flip-side of that coin is that:  nobody knows what’s going to happen.  And maybe I just cling to the bosonic odds, here, instead of the baryonic ones, because I know that sometimes experience doesn’t allow for closure.  For example, there is no perfect end-of-life conversation I can have with her.  I don’t think I can even have an end-of-life conversation with her at all.  You know that thing you have, with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or your husband or your wife, or your parent or your child?  When you lie close to them, and their face becomes a balloon that inflates to fill the universe?  And every one of their expressions is like a punch in the jaw, to you:  pure reality.  They’re everywhere.  They’re inside you.  You’re the Earth, and they’re the Moon, and between you is the Sun.

Everytime I ever saw her, she was just like that.  She was like that from the very beginning.  A gravitational centre lay between us.

Man, I tellya:  I just don’t know what I’m going to do.

Keep watching the skies, I guess.  You know all of a sudden, and with very little warning, and rather unexpectedly…I find I want to believe.

I want to believe.

So…help thou my unbelief, somebody or other.

Because this will be a rough one.

Damn.  It’s shitty.

I don’t want to do it.

***

Okay, thank you for listening, if you listened.  And, thank you for not listening, if you didn’t.

And now pardon me whilst I fall into the river of booze.

It’s A People Problem

Ha, I just watched the CBC explain to me how Canadians feel about Obama. As if I need telling, due to me being part of where those feelings are sourced. Boy, those journalistic “parsing” skill-sets are hard to switch off, aren’t they? I can’t help but feel a little sorry for journalists who, while they’ve certainly got a great story to tell, are confined to just one way of telling it over and over again. Today it’s all about what did it mean, and the sober appraisal of what may come next, and what that will mean…

Just as if Obama’s speech wasn’t the truly great one that it was: just as if, in listening to it, they couldn’t feel the warmth of the stove, that they were laying their hands on. “Change has come to America.”

It certainly has; but journalists, at least in public, are not allowed to really get that.

Which brings me to a conversation I had yesterday, at a bar.

It was about the venerable theme to Hockey Night In Canada, and how it is no longer licensed by that program because the CBC chose to play tough guy with its composer. Just as if she was trying to hold them up, you see.

Of course she wasn’t: they wanted to be able to use it for things they hadn’t licensed it for, and they owed her money. Then the licence came up for renewal. And CBC gave it a pass. I believe your people call it “hardball”.

So then they held a contest, in which they invited people across Canada to write new themes, one of which would be selected as “the” theme.

You really have to understand what a big deal this is. This is not just some random piece of music, it’s genuinely beloved.

Okay.

So here’s the deal: whoever wins the contest (it’s already been won, but I don’t know anything about it — to me there is only one “real” theme to HNIC), splits the publishing rights with CBC. So when it gets played, the composer gets paid half of what he’d get paid for any other use.

Now to me, that’s just bad business, and moreover it’s bad for business: it’s a kickback to the licensees for doing the composer the great favour of thinking his song best-suited to their own commercial purposes.

And I happen to believe that people should be paid what they’re owed, for the work they do. Pretty much full stop: they should be paid in full what they are owed, in exchange for the benefit they bring. If you can’t afford to pay them, you should learn to live without their labour. Do it yourself, instead.

Or, hire some kid who doesn’t know any better, so he won’t insist on what he’s got coming?

The way I figure it, that’s just what they did. You often hear professional hockey players say that they love the game so much they’d play it for free, and hopefully we all feel that way about our work at some time or other…but you cannot go and see a hockey game for free, and mortgages need ponying-up for, and it’s not right that somebody incur physical injuries to fatten somebody else’s wallet and receive nothing for it.

In other words, I’ve never cared if professional athletes get paid well for what they do. More precisely: I think they should be. I think they deserve a piece of the owner’s money pie. I think that’s only fair. People are coming to the game to see them.

Of course, many people do not think this is fair at all.

And, surprise surprise! It seems that these are the same people who think that splitting the composer’s royalty with his licensee is a really good deal that the composer should jump on quick, and be grateful to get.

Last night, at the bar, a fairly civil, if not what I’d call an inconsequential, disagreement:

“The CBC has an obligation to try to save money on things like that.”

“An obligation? To whom? To its ‘shareholders’?”

“Well, the taxpayers of Canada are its shareholders.”

“No, the citizens of Canada are its shareholders.”

“…All right fine, the citizens.”

“It’s an important distinction, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, yeah…whatever…”

“I mean we don’t have a poll tax in this country…”

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway they’ve got an obligation to…”

“What, to get kickbacks for themselves? What was the last composer getting, like thirty thousand a year in royalties? Don’t tell me, one shareholder to another, that that was bankrupting the public broadcaster…”

“Look. It’s a contract, okay? It’s a negotiation. They signed it with open eyes, and anyway it’s not like you’re automatically entitled to anything for your copyright anyway…”

“But you’re entitled to a hundred percent of whatever you can get from it, surely? Anyway I don’t know how much of a negotiation it was, sounds a bit more like ‘hey, let’s play a fun game where one of you lucky people gets to make money for me!’”

“Look. It’s what the market will bear…”

“‘Boy, this fence-paintin’ sure is pow’ful fun!‘”

“LOOK! What do you want, some kind of songwriter’s union, or something?”

“Hey, aren’t you in a union?”

“That has nothing to do with it! They signed a contract!“

Now, I’m a pretty mild-mannered fellow, Bloggers. I actually set the bar pretty high, when it comes to other people’s behaviours and beliefs that I’m willing to simply judge the shit out of. Normally you have to be some kind of Olympic-level hypocrite to get over it. But…

I don’t know, either we’re all drinking a lot more fortified milk, or that bar’s slipping, because…

…Because here I sat, on the very day this momentous event occurred, and not only was it somehow, amazingly, inconceivably NOT the topic of conversation — I know, only bar in the whole country where people were watching sports! — but instead we were having an argument about fairness, and how it’s not fair to insist people practise fairness and cleave to fairness, and admit fairness is desirable, or at least concede that it’s preferable to unfairness.

And at last, I see that if people are going to devote so much effort to flying over the bar anyway…well then I might as well start to lower it.

The guy in question, that I was talking to…he’s a nice enough sort, well-liked by many people (who seem to view even a milquetoast like me with a certain amount of suspicion, so this must be saying something), and no doubt he’s nice to puppy-dogs and little retarded children, fairly well-educated and decently tolerant and I’m sure he pays his rent on time and he’s got a sense of humour…

And he was happy to see Obama win, and he liked the speech…

But that man’s a cynic even so. And therefore I’m not sure he gets it.

Here’s an example, basically chosen at random, of the kind of thing I mean.  Of course since this guy is an historian instead of an reporter, he commits an error no journalist ever would, by concluding his analysis with a prescription…but you can see the general drift of the thing, regardless.  Nothing will change.  Everything is mechanical.  It’s all just the E talking.  Time to place it all in a larger context, time to show it as just a particularly prettied-up conventionalism, more of the same, because it’s about systems and limits operating on a sociohistorical continuum in which change, properly speaking, cannot really occur.  Because there are many different flavours, but there are no different foods.

If you see what I mean.

And thus:  the view of the historian and the reporter.

But we should remember something this view does not include, something actually rather important:  that we are all historians too, and reporters too, but we don’t have to do what those other historians and reporters do.  Because we outnumber them.  They are studying us, to see how to do their jobs better;  not the other way around.  This is the problem with the CBC telling me what Canadians are saying about Obama, you see — because they do not really know any more about what Canadians are saying about Obama, than I could tell them. Similarly, the problem with analyzing Obama’s speech to see who he was appealing to, who he was speaking to…

A typical journalist’s game.  But cynical:  because don’t we all know that Obama wasn’t speaking to anyone, at all?

No.  He was speaking for.

I mean that’s how you make this kind of a speech, damn it.  That’s its function.  That’s what made it so great.  But there are people out there nevertheless, who will not get that.  They will think they liked it.  But they will think of it cynically, as a strategic move by a political game-player, so they will like it only in the sense of “oh my God, these jelly beans taste like roast potatoes!“  But they won’t actually be eating roast potatoes, as the rest of us are, so they won’t be getting the actual nutrition of roast potatoes along with the taste, and so how could they ever really like it as much?

My friend in the bar, I couldn’t figure him out, at first.  Couldn’t figure out why he was getting so pissed at me.  I mean, all I said was that if I could’ve talked to these HNIC-theme contestants ahead of time, I would’ve told them “tell ‘em to pay you properly, or they can go whistle for their new theme song.”  Because they would be the young guys on the job, and I would be the wizened old coot, and I should tell them how it all works, because they need to get paid too.

To my mind, an innocuous remark.  So were was all the spicy-hot fervour coming from?

Then I realized:  he was defending some stuff he believed, because he thought I was attacking it.  Which I guess in a way I kind of was, but naturally I had no idea about that, I just mostly clunk along in this world thinking everybody’s like me.  And maybe he doesn’t even know he believes that thing he was defending, maybe he thinks he believes something else entirely.  Like, he probably doesn’t know enough about what he believes to be able to analyze all the ins and outs of the way it jerks his chain…after all, he is probably mostly a guy that after a hard day’s work would like to sit on a stool in a bar and eat potato-flavoured jelly beans and contextualize shit into meaninglessness, because this is a behaviour that he has discovered does not bite him in the ass.  He is happy Obama won, and he liked the speech…but ultimately it’s all just grist for the mill, you know?  You walk along and you sample random stuff, you put it in your mouth and try to guess what sort of flavour it has, but you are not interested in it being its own thing, you’re not interested in actually doing anything so practical or experiential as eating it, you’re just interested in figuring it out, somehow.  Like it’s a trick, a game, a skill-set you just haul out and exercise for its own sake.  Heck, you’re probably not even that hungry.  You just like to put things in your mouth.

And then if you are really, really unlucky, you run into someone like me while you’re trying to have a quiet drink.

Because what it all comes down to — what the people in the crowds get, and the people on the TVs and the barstools don’t — is that this is all about nothing less than agency itself.

Can we bear the existential terror of living in a world where people have it?  Where, God forbid, they’re entitled to it?

It’s a frightening prospect, I think:  because if other people have it, then skill-set potato-jelly-bean continuum contextualizing gets a lot harder to do — sound-bites boil away into the vacuum of free — really actually free! — will, and then there’s something even worse to follow all that up:

Because if other people have it, then that means we have it too.

It’s all Obama’s been saying.  Agency. He’s been saying “hey, everybody — we don’t need to be scared of this stuff!”  Not that I really believed he meant it really for real real, until last night:  I just figured he was a politician, and so a little bit different from me and the people I know, like the guy on the barstool.  I figured that whatever he said, as a politician he would naturally shun agency, the well-known enemy of things-as-they-are, which is the very thing upon which political careers conventionally depend…in other words I was not quite willing to risk being gulled into assigning Obama his own agency.  I wanted to reserve my right to mentally speed-sort the guy, sum him up, boil him down!  But last night, when he spoke so gratifyingly for and not cynically to, I realized that buddy on the barstool, he’s the politician…!

And Obama’s the guy I should be grabbing the after-work beer with.

“Change has come to America.”

Yes…yes…you know I think I do believe that.  Anyway I think, at the very least, I must be willing to risk believing it.

Because if I can’t bring myself to do that…

Well then, what’s my agency worth?

Eh?

I mean, it doesn’t mean I won’t still like people.  I’m actually very pro-people, heck I’m a goshdarn people-person!!! (swings fist positively)

But damn it, one way or another that bar is getting LOWERED.

And I think I may have to find a new place to drink beer, too.

Well, Bloggers, I think that’s just about all the time we have, for this session…

We’ll Get Back To That Later

Because first, I suddenly find myself irate…and what better place to be publicly irate than a blog?  It’s like that’s what they were invented for, or something.

Hold on a sec, just gotta visit the dentist…

Dear American Internet Friends

Snf…hold on a sec…musta got somethin’ in my eye…s’nuthin’, never mind…

Jesus Christ, you guys, that was practically some Captain Kirk speechin’ right there. Wow. Pretty incredible. I think I actually do believe, you know?

Wow.

I honestly don’t know how you do it. Every time you’ve got us about as pissed at you and as cynical about you as it’s possible to be…

Then you go and do that goddamn “rising to the occasion” thing.

America, you really knock me out sometimes.

And you have made a humble nation of thirty million people very proud and hopeful tonight. Also, what a speech, eh? I think that was the best speech by a politician I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes…

…But aw, g’wan, why don’t I quit my yappin’, and let’s open the dang champagne already. Because it’s a damn fine job you’ve done here today.

A DAMN FINE JOB.

Well-voted, friends. My money was totally riding on you, by the way.

I knew you could do it.