Flashback! To “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skulls…!”

Boxing Day has come and gone, Bloggers.

I slept through most of it, though; so this is like my Boxing Day, right here.

What was I going to talk about?

Oh yes, that’s right…I saw the new Indiana Jones movie.

And, it was okay.

Which is a big problem, actually. I mean, it wasn’t as bad as Temple Of Doom or anything, but therein lies the disaster, if you see what I mean…a few parts were even quite good, even if only fleetingly so (the odd line of dialogue hints at unexplored depths, and Cate Blanchett produces a marvellous villain even though she’s not technically given much to work with), and of course Harrison Ford is believable as Indy…but then he always is, isn’t he?

I do question the need to have another Indiana Jones movie that involves confronting age and mortality, and especially one that seems so preoccupied with a video-game aesthetic…you guys noticed that, right? Very pronounced fascination with the video game, in a way not a bad thing at all, perhaps just the logical extension of Spielberg’s zeal for stunting it up, previously discussed on this here blog at some horrifying length…but although I will say that Steven Spielberg probably is as reliable a crafter of mise-en-scene as any filmmaker alive today — say what you want about the man, but he understands what a camera angle is for! — still, being able to juggle isn’t the same thing as doing magic tricks, quite. The video-game thing is interesting, but decadent; true, in late-era franchise efforts, decadence isn’t necessarily something to be ashamed of, and it’s always good to have somebody around who understands that the most effective stunts are often the most economical ones…oh no, they’re going to fall off that cliff! Heh. So perhaps there was always something faintly Disneyland-esque about the problem-solving on display in the Indiana Jones movies, an embrace of stunt that sought to produce the sensation that one was not so much watching a movie as getting on a ride…the greatest ride ever built, that wasn’t made out of steel. But where does “ride-ism” lead? Since 1980 we’ve seen a remarkable infiltration of the stunt aesthetic into many different pastimes: current-day game makers and players are positively eager to portray their pastime as the leading edge of what “motion-picture” entertainment should one day become: fractal, digressive, interactive — a dream you walk through rather than being pulled through, or pushed through. A vast gallery of contiguous possible scenes that can be passed into, looped back around in, emerged from as through a trap-door or secret tunnel entrance…a universe that can be sliced along as many different axes as one has time to discover the existence of. This is the new artistic dream-logic, and its devotees would no doubt turn and point to the Spielbergian preoccupation with stunt and spectacle so brilliantly brought off in Raiders, as its watershed. California, the car culture, pulps and comics and other low-grade entertainment — and film school: monster movies colliding with John Ford westerns, Jewish history and Jules Verne and The Seventh Seal all filtered through Truffaut and Kurosawa, a little Shakespeare and a little Twain thrown in for good measure…all of these producing, first Columbo and American Graffiti, and then Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders. And was there ever more fertile soil for the creation of amusement-park rides? That got into the gaming, too, you see…

And then the gaming got into the movies. I’d be very surprised to learn that Spielberg was unaware of how he was reincorporating the aesthetic he helped to birth back into his own metier — the model atomic village Indy stumbles into seems very not-Indy at first glance, but there is something about it which compels the eye and the ear…something borrowed, or perhaps something finally paid back. A little Duke Nukem to go with your Douglas Fairbanks? It would be a mistake to say that this movie is a plain-and-simple revenant, I think: at some level here, conscious play is going on. The thing works backward, from game to ride to movie. Many might find it a little soulless; but it’d be unfair to call it stupid.

However I think it would not be a stretch to call it desultory: hey, I waited a long time to see Marion Ravenwood again, too, and is John Hurt ever not a sprightly addition to a roomful of actors? But the movie’s problem is not that it’s terrible as a piece of entertainment, but that it isn’t any good as a movie… and therein lies the whole problem in one neat and tidy package. Nothing is excavated here; everything’s already known. This isn’t an adventure story, it’s an Animatronic travelogue. This isn’t a movie, it’s a series of sketches: and some of the sketches are of fairly high quality, and include talented performers and suggestive expressions…but they’re still sketches.

They don’t really take you anywhere.

The worst part of all this being, of course, that I kind of liked that.

Which as I was saying before is precisely the problem. Because as with so many latter-day George Lucas movies, somewhere under here is the skeleton of an actual story that could be watched and liked, if it wasn’t so cut-up and covered-up…if it wasn’t so perplexingly flabby. So desultory. And as with so much recent Spielberg, there are moments where you see just where he decided to go wrong, instead of deciding to go right: where he left off the discipline of filmmaking, to pursue goals more suited to other forms…like rides, or games. It isn’t like it’s all pure accident, in other words: for some strange and vexing reason, they choose it. Germs of ideas everywhere, but all left untended, unmanaged, and so unharvested in the end: mindreading Communists, atomic bombs, and post-historical flourishes with Brando references, even…but did anyone else shudder when Indy remarked that he had “a bad feeling about this”? Did anyone else see that as a clue, to how and why this movie could be enjoyed, without yet being any good? How and why we were short-changed: because implicitly we were promised another Raiders, but the lessons of Raiders remained largely unlearned by the very two people who taught them in the first place. Trash culture, weren’t we speaking about trash culture? There’s little trashier than Raiders Of The Lost Ark…but Raiders, as a movie, is still good. You could teach a class on Raiders: on intention, influence, and aesthetic in that weirdest of all filmic critters, the Seventies adventure movie. There’s a lot to be said for it, even still — though it may be crap, it’s got at least two movies’ worth of care and craft to it, and more importantly the care and craft involved is very disciplined, very much in the “old” tradition of filmmaking. The excavations are well-planned and to the point; form follows function with wonderful economy. The thing is practically spare: there’s not an ounce of fat on it. Its strength lies in its simplicity. Even those who feel they’ve got reason to hate it would admit that, I believe.

Not that there aren’t good moments in the new Indy movie, or at least ones that make some kind of sense. When the rumble breaks out in the restaurant, that makes sense — when Indy sees the mushroom cloud, when the sleepy college town is invaded by the corrupting modern forces and actors, it makes sense. There are ideas, here; there really are. Underneath the sticks and stones, there’s something that could have been cared about, could’ve been carefully cooked down and reduced to essence, instead of just thrown into the salad bowl and tossed with a stylistic vinaigrette. Instead of merely being a bunch of scenes that happened to fall on top of each other, this could’ve been a good movie. By which I mean: a simple movie. Built from cliche, inevitably, but with just a little extra conscientousness it could’ve been poked and prodded into blossoming into the right kind of cliche…instead of being a bum, which is what it is. Everything that’s wrong is a clue to what could’ve been right: that’s the fucking tragedy of it. God, I’m tempted to list them all, honestly I am. The little momentary dream-flashes of previous Harrison Ford movies, filtered through the Indy lens…I wish I could believe these are accidents! The little embedded critique of the postmodern, the appearance of the Ark — and I really never did need to see that warehouse again, but if the only way to make this movie was to (have a nice day!) bust things up, then okay, let’s bust ‘em, Indy can have a son with whom he has a dumb relationship and they can run into the army ants for heaven’s sake and there can even be aliens from “the space between spaces”…Jones! bellows Cate Blanchett, and I want her to be in love with him, I really do, in fact I think she kind of is…but we don’t see it, except in the brisk efficiency of her acting. Maybe she could’ve said “Jones” one more time. What’s here, that wasn’t in Raiders? Nothing but the heart, and the time is probably past for this particular idea-of-movie actually, but they could’ve brought the heart along, I think. If they’d wanted to. I mean, they could’ve installed some sort of core in it! I like Indiana Jones a lot, but one thing I can’t say — one thing I defy anyone to say — is that what they liked about this movie was where the flying saucer came from, and yet that information is crammed in there for us, isn’t it? As though to soften a blow of some kind…

But, why have the blow land at all, then?

Why have John Hurt performing such an undeveloped role, that might just as well be played by somebody of lesser skill for all it really adds to the movie?

Why go to all that trouble crafting such a protagonistic mash-up character as Indiana Jones in the first place, if you’re not going to have him observe anything? Harrison Ford is quite good enough at this stuff that we will always identify with him, always see through his eyes, even if the world he comes from is as distant from us as the surface of the moon…but if he isn’t written as a character whose sight is important, he might as well not be there at all.

Think about it carefully: sight is what it’s all about, in this movie. That’s the skeleton, that lies under the flabby flesh, and whenever it’s brought up into the light, everything hangs together. That’s what’s in the various boxes; that’s what wants to be excavated.

Everything else is just scenery.

An awful admission, Bloggers: seeing this movie was not like being on a ride. It was like watching somebody be on a ride.

It probably should’ve just been made as a game in the first place.

Post Of Christmas Present

Found one for my mother.

“The Jack Acid Society Black Book”, basically a whole bunch of Walt Kelly’s songs, little prose pieces, etc…”Old Dog Trey” is in there, I’m sure.

Completely forgot I scooped it up at the Bowen Island Book Sale this summer.  “What did you get?” she asked.  “NEVER YOU MIND!” I screeched back.  “Come on, can’t I see?”  “NO YOU MAY NOT!  I DO NOT GO INTO YOUR BOXES OF BOOKS AND…”

“Yes you do.”

“ALL RIGHT IT IS TRUE THAT FROM TIME TO TIME I MAY, BUT THAT IS NOT RELEVANT!  THAT IS NOT GERMANE TO THE DISCUSSION!  NOT! GERMANE!“

It’s possible she may suspect something.

So…

Glad I remembered it!

Snow outside, Bloggers, piled up by the ploughs, making little passageways running hither and yon throughout the streets of the really rather picturesque neighbourhood I live on the fringes of.  Over its hill and far away, on the south side of Vancouver as it begins to think about facing down toward the mighty Fraser River, the old parental domicile, which in turn is hard up against the old Interurban stop in Kerrisdale, my stomping grounds as a kid — cut by the old Ravine of Second Creek, wound about by a thread of what turned from passenger to freight rail, and then to dog-walking strip (I once walked sixteen blocks without falling off the western rail of that bed, admittedly the more level one but even so…even so!), and though much changed still itself, still the Bedford Falls of my city, or perhaps the Shadow Hill.  You can still see what Chesterton was on about in his Napoleon: it’s like its own little country.  You could imagine a war there, fought entirely by elementary-school children.

Blanketed in snow, now, in a way it hasn’t been since I was ten years old.  The plateau once you get up past where the streams all met — and still do, underground — the school, the skating rink, the dumb new condos, the Chinese groceries…there are still some of them left, even now.  Even now!  It’s a bit of a ridiculous place, really.  Somehow it pulls boundaries to itself.  And many people don’t like it, but I do.

I’ll be there tomorrow!

North of me, the zany deep-focussed strip of Granville Street, the old logging road, once filled with antique stores and greasy spoons and Hungarian restaurants, now over-cluttered with high-end shoe stores and young lawyers with laptops and ballcap-bozos pretending they know how they like their Scotch — the Chinese stores all gone! — but then the road plummets part the theatre to the bridge over False Creek, and past it Stanley Park, the water and the mountains and then the sky.  Freighters bobbing out there, the serrated edge of Texada Island in the distance, that the Natives say just rose out of the Inside Passage one day, just like that.  Like a big violet breadknife, in the evenings.  Little white Lego-pieces of apartment buildings downtown, and then the sodium-vapour fairy dust climbing the slopes of the mountains, atop them the white lights of the ski hills.  Howe Sound like a funnel, blowing the winter Squamish out into the Gulf.  No spring tides for a while, I guess:  the Strait of Georgia’s customary extra tidal charge is headed down into Puget Sound.

It’s midnight now, just about exactly, I think;  better post, before the moment passes.

Just wanted you all to know where I’m at.

Where are you?

Merry Christmas, Bloggers.  See you after the turkey bloat goes away.

What ARE Birds?

We just don’t know.

(Well, a good idea’s a good idea…)

So hello to all the Bloggers and all our ships at sea!

Today I wanted to talk about education. Specifically, science education.

Boy, there sure is a lot of it, isn’t there?

I mean of the pop-science bestseller and the Discovery channel special presentation type — a lot of it. And it’s all very interesting, notwithstanding some of the more “QFT hip hip!” offerings…all very interesting indeed, but it doesn’t start with the basics as much as it probably should.

So today (well…actually a week ago) I was contemplating the little matter of the four forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity, as we call them. And it struck me that of these, only “gravity” is a good and necessary and true and artful word…astronomy (you may or may not know) being the first science, it scooped up all the most poetic language for itself before the other disciplines had fairly started, and to this day it continues the tradition of artful naming: we speak of hydrogen burning in the core, the helical rising of Sirius, the first extrasolar planet to be discovered was named Osiris. Astronomy’s the most literary of the sciences, sketching vast sweeps of space and time in cool yet thrillingly dramatic language, describing processes in a way psychology only wishes it had gotten to first. So: “gravity”, or “gravitation”…while not strictly an astronomical concept, it partakes of astronomy’s brilliant naming-tactics, perhaps because gravity is the physical concept most important to astronomical endeavours…

But the names of the other three forces suck. Don’t they?

Worse than that, they don’t reveal much. Newton frankly admitted that the name “gravity” might as well be “black magic”, for all it really explained about how it works…but in this limitation there’s a certain felicitous reward for the careful thinker: the word “gravity” is essentially empirical, descriptive, and so it highlights our lack of knowledge about the processes underlying that description. What is “gravity”? Merely the principle that masses are attracted to other masses. And until Einstein, it was a principle that defied the explication of origin. It just was what it was: gravity.

A fitting word. Could’ve come from Greek mythology: “necessity”. The meaning is right there, like a smack in the eye with a snowball.

Take “electromagnetism”, though; a word that seems to explain much, but because of that seeming actually frustrates the seeking after knowledge. From “electricity” and “magnetism”, words which once described empirically and mysteriously in the manner of “gravity”, but which being turned to very practical uses acquired the aspect of thought-blockers. Electricity is something you make and buy; magnetism is something you use and sell. And “electromagnetism” isn’t so much a description of their relationship as it is an assumption of comprehension that doesn’t really exist — a portmanteau in place of a distinct meaning. How hard is it to explain to people what is and is not electromagnetism? It’s very hard: that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon seems counterintuitive to most people; that radiation is a category including both electromagnetic and non-electromagnetic phenomena seems just plain wilfully confusing on the part of the scientists who make up and apply such terms. The artless neologisms go right down to the land of constituent particles: the “electron” orbits the proton (well, not really it doesn’t, but there you go — confusion), but why is it an “electron”, instead of something else? Why do we get that “electro-” bit in there? There’s nothing particularly “electro-” about the particle, in our modern assumption of what that prefix’s derivation stands for; it’s just a particle. It just does what it does.

Why call it anything, after all?

If what you call it doesn’t describe its nature.

And the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force…these are obviously just right out, just really bad names. They’re forces associated with the atomic nucleus, fine: but what does that mean? And one is stronger than the other, okay…but so what?

So what?

We could stand to have some better names. More evocative names, and less tied to the randomness of discovery in our own history and linguistics. Newton got it right, but that was a long time ago, and we know more about gravity now than we did then.

Anyway so I thought, as I was standing in my elevator today. What would be a good way of talking about these forces, that exist for real whether we have names for them or not, that actually described what they did? Even if you couldn’t get the poetry in there, there’s got to be something better than “electroweak”…so just anything, anything will do. So, okay. As Venus Flytrap tells us, “tron” is a Swahili word meaning “do” (little joke there) — well, okay fine! “Do” is a good place to start! But what is the “doing” that these doohickeys do?

The elevator doors open, to find me offering these preliminary suggestions:

The Making force

The Changing force

The Communicating force

The Reciprocal force

And I’m still working these out, of course, still toying with them…

But what the hell, it’s a blog.

And anyway their forces may not be forces, right? “Force”, after all — like “love” — is just a word, really. And so the best we can hope for from it is that it stays in a constant relation with its real-world correlate, definitionally speaking. But, maybe that relation is slipping these days, just a little bit? What is a “force”? Very soon now, it will be a hundred years since old Albert explained what Newton couldn’t — that gravity comes to us indirectly, via the curvature of spacetime. Well, Newton could hardly have guessed at this! He was used to thinking about force…

And gravity may not be one…though it undeniably has one. But mostly what gravity does is allow us to have (and participate in!) something a person could call a universe. Without gravity, no stars, no galaxies, no planets or moons or comets or asteroids or…well, really anything, apart from a lot of molecular hydrogen just zooming around. So…what’s a good name for that force?

Besides gravity, I mean…

Gravity’s the real stinker: what’s it all about, eh? Everything else folds in nice and neatly to simple concepts, but gravity’s the contextualizing force, and it may be more than that still…but like what birds are, we just don’t know. What it is. If you see what I mean. To say what gravity is, we sort of need to know what mass is, what matter is. What is matter? We just don’t know. We know what energy is, pretty much: stuff that makes stuff happen. Or not happen. Okay, maybe we don’t know what it is, but we know why we call it what we do, and that’s something anyway. Isn’t it?

The Making force, the Changing force, the Communicating force…but what’s getting Made and Changed, what’s Communicating and why? To Make is to create particle masses by playing around with them…but what are they? How do we even know they’re there? Absent their gravitational interactions, the only way is by measuring how much energy it takes to overcome their inertia…people talk about inertial mass vs. gravitational mass all the time, as you may know. However, the only thing we really know about inertia is that it’s related to isotropy, the symmetry of space and time that yields the physical constants…such knowing arriving in our heads thanks to the woman people always say doesn’t exist, the elusive Genius Female Physicist herself, Emily Noether.

A suggestive name, considering how deeply Einstein’s Relativity is indebted to her work…

But then if you follow that relationship of influence around a little bit, you might stop at some point and say “now waitasecond…except for the gravitational effects, how is this gravity stuff any different from inertia, damn it?”

To which I would reply: well, it keeps the universe being a universe, doesn’t it? So that’s something, isn’t it?

Or is it?

Well, we just don’t know.

Snow falls in Vancouver, like a million tiny little white elevators; straight from outta the neverending sky. Covering the cars with all that feathery cold stuff. Little constellations of frozen water, wheeling soundlessly through the black void.

Jesus, don’t get me started on water, though…

Or we’ll be here all night.

And damn it I’ve got presents to wrap, before I go to bed.

All that paper I’ve got to get off that roll…

See you tomorrow, Bloggers!

They Also Serve, Who Only Sit Around And Link

Christmastime, Bloggers; and the snow is falling on the ground.

With a couple of consequences: my present-buying and foolish-spending money will not arrive on the streets of Vancouver until the 29th, also I’ve been shovelling snow and probably will not do the old annual Christmas Eve sit-around-and-drink thing with the Usual Gang Of Idiots I laughingly call friends…and believe me, if you knew them that’s what you’d laughingly call them as well.

But surprisingly, as it turns out…this will all be fine. Two very strange parties I attended recently, and the peculiar realization that nothing can be done about my finances in the short term, have left me thinking that maybe having no dough for Christmas is a good thing overall. No running around for me! My father’s learning how to be laid up in bed, my brother’s away on a skiing trip, and I’m considering that as lowdown as The Year Without A Christmas feels when you’re twenty, once you get past forty it’s a positive relief. So: pencils for everyone! You can write with ‘em, you can sharpen ‘em up…hey, they’re terrific! And one size fits all! The perfect gift.

Though not quite as nice as this: Nina’s rather fascinating year-end Q-and-A post over at Virgin Reads, which is as appealing a comics-related diary entry as any I’ve read…also in six words she manages to make me jealous of Tucker! “They interest him. He interests me.” We should all be so lucky.

Very much looking forward to the Virgin’s 2009 output! And I liked this column a lot before, you know…but now I feel even more perked-up for it. A wonderful experiment.

Also on my unChristmas list:

Rick Veitch demonstrates the fact that I was not nearly as talented a kid as everybody kept telling me…I KNEW it! Those liars…

But of course it could be worse: I could be RAB, and have gone quietly, utterly mad while no one was looking…

Also, David tees it up again, Tom Spurgeon conducts one goddamn long interview with Tucker, I had no idea that this even existed, and I should really start linking to stuff that nobody’s seen a million times already, shouldn’t I? I mean I feel like I’m sneaking food from other people’s lunchboxes here…okay fine, you asked for it, man I cannot BELIEVE I bought this comic…the strangest of letdowns, the moment when two equally-geeky parts of my brain met and cancelled each other out…a staggering thing, like eating a peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwich with slices of tomato in it and lots of pepper…

Which is what you eventually end up with, when you make too much of a habit sneaking food from other people’s lunchboxes.

You think I’m joking?

Hell, I’m going to go have one right now. You have to eat it sitting down, or you’ll collapse onto the floor in confusion.

A little more posting later, unless I decide to a) do some work, b) read some Little Nemo, or c) read some Little Nemo. Anyway, Merry Christmas, bloggers, if I don’t talk to you before then. For those of you feeling not quite as adventurous as I, here’s my mother’s most famous sandwich, the “Cultus Lake Special”: white bread, mayonnaise, red onion, mandarin orange slices, black pepper. She swears by it.

Never actually seen her eat one, mind you…

Oh, and Fred Hembeck linked to this. I like to watch it while eating mayonnaise, myself…

Okay! Just be glad I didn’t link to the hurdy-gurdy festival.

A Mighty Long Walk For A Cup Of Coffee

Hola, Bloggers — I’ve been interviewed!  By the Mindless Ones (well, who else would be so foolish as to interview little ol’ longwinded me?), and strangely we didn’t talk about what I originally thought we were going to talk about at all!

Very enjoyable experience;  I think my ego grew three sizes this day.

So if you’ve got a few hours to kill and a bit of a masochistic streak, go read it, and while you’re at it the interview with Andrew Hickey’s quite interesting, so I’ll recommend that too.

I’m going to be hosting these Mindless Ones myself, for an interview that hopefully will be up before too long…just as soon as I can think of some questions to ask them that don’t simply consist of me parroting what they asked…and there’s that whole Christmas and New Year’s thing as well, I suppose.  So it’s complicated.  On the other hand I’m pretty much locked indoors by a raging snowstorm, so I’ve got some time to kill…

Frpl Fodder: The Bozos Beyond The Mountains

Such a pleasure each year around this time, to turn on KCTS and see the J.P. Patches retrospective…why all that’s missing are the MAOAM ads.

Most of you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

But as I was telling a young friend just recently, back in the mad old bad old days, we used to have rather a lot of local childrens’ programming on public access TV. Of course Vancouver was too small a town at that time for such stuff — but Seattle wasn’t, and Seattle had J.P. Patches.

J.P. PATCHES!!!

I could not possibly explain it to you…unless in your town, you had one of your own, of these idiosyncratic, homegrown, underfunded kiddie-shows. A cramped studio and barely-sane staff of technicians and performers, very plainly just making stuff up out of nothing, and laughing their asses off while they were doing it. Mr. Rogers this was not, nor was it anything that in anybody’s wildest dreams could become a national sensation — J.P. Patches was a show about a clown who lived in a junkyard, that incorporated long and boring weather reports.

No…no, see, I knew I couldn’t explain it.

Anarchy, is what it really was. Total anarchy and madness.

So if you’re old enough to have had a J.P. Patches of your own, whatever it was…well, what was it?

And…what would be a good way of describing it, to someone who’d never seen it?

“The Art-Comix Crowd”

I really do have a few things to post about besides comics, you know?

But Blogorama just keeps poking me in the eye, and I don’t know why. I thought they’d settled down. Well, not exactly settled down: but I thought they’d chanced upon a different sort of a strategy for saying “you fuckers aren’t wanted here”, that wasn’t so in-your-face. Observe, with a mixture of admiration, horror, and amusement, this link! Wherein you can not only find people saying things that are funny and inclusive and even respectably opinionated, but also people saying things which are shockingly cross-wired, like “I think Kirby and Miller and Moore and Spiegelman and the rest of them are overrated; I loved Secret Wars, and Greg Land rocks”…to the point where some people reveal that their guilty secret is something like “not digging Spawn”, or “liking Silver Age comics”.

Astonishing, no?

And yet all in good fun, it seems to me. And yet, and yet…all in good fun, absolutely, but also as clear a communication as could be wished for that the new Blogorama is not the old, and that those who liked the old one will find themselves in a very tiny minority now so they better get used to it.

And, you know…that’s fair enough. The people reading this blog are all like “ugh, Kirby’s so weird” and “I hate the way Ditko draws fingers” and “Maus wasn’t very good” and “I thought as a big dumb superhero movie Spider-Man 3 was just fine”, and that’s…well, that’s just the way it is.

Caveat: I am by no means intending to say that everyone on Blogorama has really bad taste, or is stupid, or anything like that. Plenty of people answered this post with things like “I have a full run of Kickers, Inc., which I still think is awesome so all you bitches can kiss my ass!!!”, and that’s not bad, that’s funny. The people who nodded off while reading Watchmen…hey, tastes differ. It doesn’t automatically mean a person is a grazer just because they prefer Twinkies over Gateau St.-Honore. Because there’s a big difference between preferring shit (I’ve been known to prefer it myself), and not knowing the difference between it and Shinola, you know? So this is very far from a blanket condemnation — we all have some shit that we like, and there’s nothing wrong with that…

Caveat ends. …But it’s instructive to consider a lot of these responses as a mild rebuke, intentional or unintentional, from the new Blogorama posters to the old. “We don’t have anything to apologize for”, it seems to say in a rather affable, mostly non-confrontational way. “We’re here too, now, and we like what we like. Moreover, there’s not that much difference between us all, you like shitty comics too…”

And then one by one, the hands are raised. “We have news for the beautiful people“, one could interpret those hands as saying…but it’s not necessary to adopt such an adversarial posture, is it? No, probably not; the new Blogorama has already been so marred by accusations of condescension, tag-teaming, and dogpiling on those who seem not to be foursquare behind The Firm, that when offered a graceful elision over reader differences like this one, it’d probably be stupid not to take it for what it’s worth, and thereby defuse whatever feelings of hostility might have been built up by poor PR and micromanagement of comments. Everybody deserves a place. Somebody said something harsh to someone without having a good reason to do so, somebody else stormed off in a state of high dudgeon…

…Somebody else yet was all prepared to write a blistering condemnation of somebody or somebodies for their really very bad attitudes…

But to look at this post is to see, I think, that that’s all unnecessary, just a lot of wasted energy. Why do it? Why expend so much effort creating an “other side” just to paint them as horrible snobs, whether lowbrow or highbrow?

That’s about how I was thinking. Breathing a little sigh of relief…

…And then I have to read this fucking shit:

“Before the floor is opened up to responses, I want to ask (ha ha) that the art comix crowd, who usually respond to things like this with their opinion that periodical comics are doomed and that we’re all stupid/immature/whatever we are for reading superhero books, please refrain. Those comments are not relevant to the question at hand, which is aimed at those who read and enjoy the floppies. I’m a pretentious bastich myself, so there’s little doubt in my mind that I’ll offend the popcorn comics crowd, too, in time. Right now, though, I’m trying to talk to those folks. Yes, I know—most of the monthlies are about steroid cases who dress in tights and punch stuff. But the reality is, there are some very compelling narratives being told in those comics if you’ve got a receptive frame of mind.”

So, okay…

So, message received, Blogorama. Tell you what, let’s not all get along, you’re right, that would be much better. The “art-comix crowd”, really…yes, they really do tend to get above themselves, don’t they? Them and their stupid art comix like fucking All-Star Superman or Silver Age Flash. Or do you really think Spiegelman is trolling your blog? Jesus Christ, like you can’t tell good stories while including multiple foregrounded ass-shots of Black Canary, or having Spider-Man ponder how the Japanese Internment is like a metaphor for the plight of superheroes in these difficult times, ho-lee SHIT. Yes, Maus was so overrated, I mean what’s the big deal, eh? And that fucker James Joyce can kiss my ass with his stupid Dubliners, too, I mean why do I have to read this crap? Why isn’t anyone wearing a circus outfit? Why isn’t anyone doing the slo-mo walk or kicking butt, for heaven’s sake? Meh, I thought “Brideshead Revisited” was just okay…but I’ll take that episode of MASH where Hawkeye thinks the baby is a chicken over it any day. Because I’m a fucking grazer, I can’t tell the difference between shit and Shinola, say what is this, a video game? Some kinda book? A movie? Can you eat it? No? Is it for putting up your ass? Whuh? Never mind, wrap it up…I’ll take it!

I find your accusations of condescension incredibly insulting. I can condescend much better than that, actually, I mean if I really must, if you will really have it no other way. You guys will excuse any piece of shit so long as it is a superhero piece of shit, it seems…and I won’t, so you want to say I just think I’m too good for superheroes. But that’s fucking stupid: I’m not too good for them. Or rather…I shouldn’t be, but you can’t keep shoving this heap of decomposing goldfish in my face and telling me it’s caviar, and expect me to go along with it just because the goldfish are wearing capes! Meanwhile it’s you who thinks the superheroes are juvenile and stupid and worthless, isn’t it? That’s why you Blogorama bastards are always trash-talking the “art-comix crowd” (ha!), who want to treat comics like movies, like books, like art…like anything where you can have good things and bad things and so-so things, and know the difference between all of them, and know them for what they are, and enjoy them for what they are. Because you think if ever one of them is shown to be worthless, then that will mean they all are worthless, and that you really are an imbecile for liking them. So, “art comix”: BAD! BAD FOR SUPERHEROES, BAD FOR COMICS! But how can comics be bad for comics, jackass? You know, not too long ago somebody called Sean Kleefeld an art-comix snob, if you can believe that…you know, the old proprietor of FFPlaza.com? Art snob. And, how silly is that?

Because obviously, they really meant: turncoat!

Sad to think you’d probably agree with that, Blogorama. Oh, no, did I just put words in your mouth? Well, all’s fair in love and war, I guess. And turnabout’s fair play too, I’ve heard. Please show some respect and leave us alone while we discuss comics, art snobs…we’ll tell you when we think you have something to say, but right now you’re just being rude. Man, you cannot even go over there and say “hey, what about these other comics, that were made into movies…?” They will jump you if you do that. Shocking! An outrage! Landru commands the outlanders be punished for their insolence! Jee-ZUS.

Here’s something you all might want to get straight: we (meaning you and me) are not an oppressed people. Just because most regular people naturally assume that Thor is gay (by the way: he totally is), does not mean you and I are oppressed. So what’s the reason for me to back up Thor stories (say) that look like they were written and drawn by a pack of retarded chimpanzees with their thumbs glued together, just because doing so makes you look slightly less than uniquely illiterate for not knowing it ain’t no Brothers Karamazov? Oh, no, but if I don’t back up your foolish exaltation of shit, then it’ll be me who becomes your oppressor, right?

You really need one that badly, don’t you?

You really need someone to look down on you, so that when Daniel-Day Lewis does a Gambit movie, or John Goodman finally plays Mr. Sinister (fingers crossed, everybody!), you can have someone to say “in your face!” to. Is that it? Because obviously no one else is ever going to give a shit. So you need me to be a snob, so when the magical day comes you can say:

Screw you and your Stuck Rubber Baby and your Krazy Kat, turncoat! Batman always wins!

But of course that day will never come, and meanwhile this is not rational behaviour. If you’re trying to gain acceptance by preferring shit because it’s not shitty, and then to prove it’s not shitty you’re elevating it more and more the shittier it gets…it’s like betting on the same busted hand twice, isn’t it? Oh, sorry, I forgot: you don’t want us to get along. Hold on, let me just slip into something a little more contemptuous for you…

(ahem) Look, I know Alan Moore fucked up a perfectly good superhero detective story by having it be about something, but do you have to shout it from the rooftops like that? I mean, he doesn’t come around your place and tell you how to blow on your jug, does he? Moron. With you, it’s always “Will Eisner was a hack” this, and “Pogo’s hard to read” that, always with the Ultimate Sue porn-face = AWESOME and the need for bigger shoulderpads and the where the hell are all the guns, man, yo where my big penises be at…!

But really, have you seen this new Derrida bande-dessinee? It is SO COOL, I’m telling you. Much cooler than a man dressed in a big condom wrestling another man in a big condom, I mean it is to laugh, no? Ah, you Americans, you are such children…all-ways wis you eet ees zee BANG! and zee POW!, n’est-ce pas? Papa, I want to keel you! Mama, I want to…ZUT ALORS!

AIEEEEE…!

(coughs)

Was it good for you, you fucking gutless passive-aggressive SNOBS?

I admit, I was kinda faking it that time. Maybe next time I could get into it for real?

Stop being so insulting.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go re-read some old Roy Thomas Avengers. Oooh, lookit me, I’m Mr. Art-Comix…!

Hey, like Spike Lee said: wake up.

Bendis…There Are No Words

Well, maybe three…

“Canadian concentration camps“, I mean can you believe this jackass?  This JACKASS.  Holy shit, Canada’s in on it all too, I had no effin’ IDEA that the Marvel Universe’s version of Canada was such a FUCKING SHITHOLE.  Ho!  Ho!  I mean but of course, it all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Naturally, tractable old vassal state Canada could totally be relied upon to march in absolute lockstep with a corrupt American government, I mean COME ON, where is there the slightest shred of evidence to so much as imply that we would NOT?  I mean it’s not as though there’s any recent history to suggest otherwise, is there?  American political prisoners stored on Canadian soil so they won’t fall under the protection of the U.S. Constitution?  SOUNDS TOTALLY NOT GODDAMN MORONICALLY ASS-BACKWARDS FROM THE WAY THINGS USUALLY WORK AT ALL.

Jesus!

Who is this clown?

Scale

Look up, Bloggers…wayyyyy up…

The problem, I submit, is one of scale; scale being a thing that adults understand and children do not. You could even say, if you wanted to, that a child’s education is generally well-described as a process of learning about scale, and how to grapple with its realities.

But we are all children in some way or other.

And a complete understanding of scale is something that will probably be forever beyond us.

I’ve heard it called “epistemic scope”; you may be familiar with it from looking at sunsets, or at the night sky’s awe-inspiring cascade of stars. At a certain extremity, our ability to conceive of scale abandons us. That’s where the awe comes from: we look up — wayyyyy up! — and suddenly realize we have no idea how high that is. It’s just too much bigger than us.  The mind blanks out;  the almighty ego-shield drops, and the sublime enters in.

Awe.

Of course, it is very easy to forget about that particular awe, if you are not seeing it every night…easy to pretend that it isn’t “really” there at all. The experience of the sublime is not easily recalled to us, after the moment in which it occurs. We have to use tricks, to pitch ourselves back into it.

Some of the tricks are rather astonishing: and you could argue that even striving to grasp them, the tricks themselves and how they work, adds up to an encounter with the sublime.

Or, one look at Jupiter through a telescope will often do it, too.

So look up!

Because the scale of our world is changing.

But before we know it, we don’t know it, if you see what I mean. Some of these sorts of realizations of “true” scale, that get incrementally more capacious as time goes on and knowledge increases, have a very long incubation period indeed. A child wants to know what his parent does when they go to “work” — but being told, it takes a while to develop an understanding of it. It starts with “going into that building”, moves up to “sitting at desk” and “talking on phone in ways that don’t make any sense”…one day the child gets a job of his own, and knowledge appears, but first there are many adjustments that need making, before knowledge can really be known.

In a similar way, people used to think Heaven was “the sky” — going up into the sky, going down under the earth, passing into the rocks and the trees, being carried away by the wind across the horizon…that’s what the world after life was, and that’s how big it was: as big as the biggest thing you can’t understand. Admittedly these were all adaptive strategies that were created prior to any understanding of the realities of scale familiar to us now, but they were not prior to the awareness that there were unguessed-at mysteries of scale out there in the first place.

So in a way, it’s the same thing.

And thus, we also practise such adaptive pre-understanding strategies today…because we still need to. Science fiction writing and reading counts for one of these adaptations: I’ve gone on about it in tedious detail, I know, that none of it is real…but, you know, it really isn’t. It’s just an attempt to approximate. To find the range. “Terraforming” came up in this connection before, I believe — a thing that we can’t do (at least not in a designed and purposeful way!), because our understanding of what a planet is — how it works — how big it is! — is insufficient. But we can imagine knowing such things one day, as the child imagines one day sitting at a desk in an office and blithering incomprehensible nonsense into a phone, and then somehow that makes electricity, or something. Whatever that is. Anyway later on you go home and have spaghetti, which is delicious.

Science fiction’s not much different. At least, in its future-imagining it isn’t much different. It’s pretty much ignorant as hell (“talking on the phone makes electricity!”), but it is capable of acknowledging that such a thing as the scaling problem exists, and tries manfully to grab hold of it in at least an intuitive way. Only thing is, though…that scaling problem’s itself being re-scaled, and that’s making the job of intuiting or approximating its relationships a bit tougher. The things we’ve discovered (“we” meaning humanity) this year alone, make us look like fools for believing much of what we did last year. And the circle keeps widening faster and faster, and at some point a certain understanding of scale that we have not possessed before is going to dawn on us. Although it takes a lot of imagining to anticipate that kind of brush with the sublime, and most people can’t do it.

And I’m not talking about the Timewave, the Singularity, or Moore’s Law, or even plain old future shock. The fact is, those things aren’t real either, just more approximations: we don’t just one day make the jump to hyperspace, as the ripple of change overruns itself and the Cerenkov radiation starts to sing throughout the pool. These things actually take time. Sometimes a lot of time: anyway the piles of strange garbage build up a lot faster than the anomie, even in the short run. And we will not simply all become as angels one day, escaping all temporality and limitation…that’s just a metaphor.

What will happen, though, is that our approximations, our adaptive strategies, will start experiencing some significant slippage, as our ability to form for-the-sake-of-argument premises starts to be undercut by new scalar discoveries. We’re used to getting a theory, wearing it hard, patching it a few times as it eventually starts to fray, and then fray some more, and then only after it’s just a bunch of rags do we go out and get ourselves a brand-new replacement theory, just as we have saved up enough money to do so. However, what happens if the garment of theory can suddenly go from fray to puff of smoke inside a day? Scale means context; extent of interconnections; limits. So start fooling around with that slider, and future-imagining itself is going to have to make a very big, very serious change. As in: it’s going to have to change all its bases. If we don’t want to start writing science fiction about science fiction, it’s going to have to change all its bases.

Another way of saying: it’s going to have to start giving them up, as poor approximations that no longer fit reality well enough to be of use. And, it won’t want to! But eventually there will be no other choice. The whole process of arguing about stuff is going to have to change: for example it is now still possible to argue about…oh, I don’t know, let’s say global warming…in a way where you can be right or wrong, but not substantially out of whack with what the people on the other side of the argument believe about what the world is, and how it works. The factors in the argument are many, but they are not of many different kinds: you don’t have people on this side saying “no, no, it’s the Higgs boson!” while the people opposing their view bellow out “you’re all idiots, it’s the morphogenetic field…!”

Just doesn’t happen.

Yet.

But something like it will happen eventually. It’ll just sneak up on us one day. Scale. It’ll intrude. And then if we don’t look sharp about it, we’ll find we’re not all on the same page anymore at all. What we’re learning now about the way the world works is BIG, and it’s tossing so many preconceived notions into cocked hats that we’re running out of cocked hats. From oceanography to microbiology to astronomy to archaeology…to economics! To history! To freakin’ agriculture! What I’m saying is, like it or not, the big picture is about to be all up for grabs. And the time for imagining that is over: it’s here.

Look up at the sky, at the stars. They used to be gods and goddesses. Then they were holes in the wall around the world. Then they were a glorious country club of possibility, that we looked forward to being admitted to one day. And then at last they were a limitless host of sterile suns.

But now “limitless” has gotten a whole lot bigger than it used to be — even “finite” is bigger than we thought it was — and as it turns out those stars may not be so sterile after all.

“Do you think, somewhere up there, someone might be looking down at us, wondering if we’re here?”

The correct answer to that question used to be “maybe…who knows?”

But it’s not that anymore.

It’s something else, instead. What, I don’t know. But it’s something.

The slider is moving, down at the bottom of the pile of other sliders that rest atop it.  By necessity, our species has always much heavier on theory than on observation, but that seems to be changing, these days.

The trick is to see it.

As the piles of strange garbage mount higher and higher, and more mysteriously, all around us.

Hmm, can’t remember why I started writing this, now…

Blogorama In Lockdown

Shit, they are really dogpiling on the critical voices over there these days, eh?  Like, somehow the bar you have to get over to be considered a troll has come way down, apparently.

So what do you think, should they just go ahead and post a comment policy and a FAQ?  Have things gotten that bad, yet?

I was going to write quite a bit more about this, but I’ve decided to hold off for another week or so, and see if they calm down.  I think that would be great, if they did.