Capicolli Sandwiches, Pomegranate Limeade, Port Salut Cheese, And Rain At Last

…And also, at last, a use for the pomegranate.

So I’m taking the day off, to catch up on moderately fun stuff I’ve been sidelining for a while. One of which is the following rant, cross-posted from my buddy BentGuy’s blog (permalink forthcoming), where he’s graciously invited me to do a walk-on.

So here it is, in all its glory:

***

The Frog Jumps Out

Well, I can sure pick ‘em. Hey, readers of BentGuy’s blog — here are a few thoughts I had that I was going to put in a comment, until they grew and grew, and then grew some more until I started to have thoughts about the thoughts themselves, and then thoughts about the thoughts about the thoughts…

And it all starts with cell phones.

Specifically, with the rather odd fact that our provincial governments seem reluctant to ban their use in motor vehicles. B.C.’s own Attorney-General offers the explanation that a law against cell phones in cars would be too hard to enforce. My father, though he voted Liberal, finds this funny: “the seat-belt laws were hard to enforce, too” he points out, and he’s right. But such is the state of things today that there’s even a better example, of a more basically unenforceable law, with far less justification behind it, that nevertheless gets followed.

That would be the ban on smoking within six meters of doors, windows, bus stops, awnings (awnings!) , the windward side of ferries, etc. etc. etc. BentGuy, the bastard, thinks this is funny, because he isn’t a smoker (and I am, I should be careful to point out)…but I think it’s funny for quite a different reason. I think it’s funny because there is no cop so slack-ass that he or she can afford to waste precious time enforcing this unenforceable law, pulling out tape measures to make sure the magic six-meter limit isn’t challenged. Because you know, within the six meters you can get cancer! But outside the six meters it’s totally safe. Hey, and you can’t smoke in a car with a kid who’s under sixteen years of age, that’s not safe, that’s poor parenting! Soon as the sixteenth birthday comes though, you’re on your own, kid.

A lot of these laws are stupid. Cars can idle within six meters of a doorway, window, awning, what-have-you, but people can’t smoke there. Hmm. Of course we wouldn’t have this problem if the government just banned the sale of tobacco, would we? Dangerous stuff, this tobacco. Health Canada says it kills innocent bystanders, the province says it’s too dangerous to be smoked under an awning, where people might go…and yet it’s an over-the-counter product. Pretty much sounds about as safe as plutonium. And yet anybody can sell cigarettes, just so long as they don’t DISPLAY THE PACKS.

So…does that sound right to you?

This all ties together in a minute or two, I promise. But before we get started, I’d just like to say that, as a smoker, I would fully support a ban on the importation and sale of tobacco. Fully. However, I think the current law is awful, pernicious, Draconian bullshit.

But then again I guess it really doesn’t matter what I think, because you know what? Everybody mostly obeys that unenforceable law, anyway. That’s right; even though no one’s gonna catch you breaking it, and even if they do it’d have to be a mighty slow news day for anybody to want to do anything about it, and even though you’ve got to figure there’s just about no way in hell you’d ever walk away from a courtroom having to pay any sort of a fine because you smoked publicly when you know perfectly well we’ve got a girl coming over in 2010 and come on you guys, we’ve got to get this place cleaned UP…!

Yes, EVEN SO…!

…Still for the most part, people choose to obey this law. Even though they quite plainly do not have to.

And therefore, the obvious question: so why would it make any difference if a law banning cellphone use in cars was hard to enforce?

It wouldn’t make any difference, and yet the government won’t contemplate passing such a law, and that’s a red flag, and I ain’t joking. Twenty years from now Jane Fonda’s going to be taking home a Best Actress award for her work in the movie about the cell phone conspiracy, and how awful it was, how compromised they all were in the governments, the regulatory agencies, etc. etc. Because, look, these cellphones really are the cigarettes of the twenty-first century, you know? And maybe they’re even worse than that. Because microwaves scything through your skull is probably at least somewhere on a continuum with smoke swirling in your lungs; whereas secondhand smoke is probably NOT on a continuum with two tons of metal being ineptly piloted down the street at forty kilometers an hour. I mean we can’t even get this behaviour banned in a SCHOOL ZONE, for heaven’s sake! And people can’t even cross the street competently while talking on a cell phone, I’ve seen ‘em try and they can’t do it. George Romero’s zombie-as-consumer stuff looks pretty out of date, now…and as for the supposedly dangerous nature of zombies themselves, did I mention that people talking on cell phones can’t even cross the street with a sufficiency of skill? No one notices, because they’re all on cell phones too. They’re zombies too, and just like in the movies there’s fast zombies and there’s slow zombies.

The fast ones are in cars, right?

But the slow ones are VERY SLOW INDEED, and you can see it. Man, I might worry about a zombie cat, or something. Sure, a cat; a cat might get me. But a zombie human-person? Never in a million years, my little friend. I’d already be three blocks away before they even realized I had once been there. SLOW. Mindbogglingly slow. But very nimble when it comes texting, I suppose…

…And you know, something’s sure as hell screwy around here, isn’t it? Because I’ve been thinking about this for about a month or so now. I’ve been kind of musing aloud about the dark side of cell phones, to friends, family, even strangers. About waste disposal problems, for instance! These things are little sachets of lead and mercury, nightmares waiting to happen, and we’ve not only mass-produced them but we’ve made them disposable. DISPOSABLE PHONES. Nobody even pays for them, they just give ‘em away for nothing with the contract. New contract, new phone, throw the old one into the landfill. If you built a house out of these things, the government wouldn’t let you live in it. But if you just wanna hold one next to your ovaries for a couple years before tossing it on a pile to get rained on, that’s fine. My God, we treat ‘em like they’re plastic bags, trillion a year, no problem, we just throw ‘em in the sea and watch ‘em kill our fish. NO PROBLEM. Jesus. We’re through the looking-glass here, people. And (again) you know what?

No one wants to know about it.

No one wants to know about it. I’ve talked to dozens of people about cell phones over the last few weeks, and NONE of them want to hear it, to the point where they do what little kids do, they ostentatiously change the subject and pretend you won’t notice. Which is very serious business, because that’s practically the sort of behaviour we normally associate with big-league taboos, like CRIME. They don’t want to know, and they’re not GONNA know. La-la-la can’t hear you. You could get in a fistfight over this kind of thing. That’s how bad things have already gotten.

And that’s why it took me so long to write all this down, because none of it adds up. Even cigarettes were never as touchy a subject as this, you know, so…what the hell’s going on? That’s what I asked myself.

What the hell IS all this nonsense? Where’s it all coming from?

And then I figured it out: cellphones and all their wireless-telegizmo cognates aren’t the cigarettes of the twenty-first century, after all. They’re the BIG OIL of the twenty-first century, instead. And the reason governments don’t want to regulate them is because they’ve got an AWFUL lot invested in them. Because every time someone’s not using their cellphone, somewhere money is not being made; and if we all threw away our wireless gizmos tomorrow, the next day Apple and Microsoft would both get their stock price chopped in half, and people would lose their homes. Two out of every three dollars slated to come down the pipeline of the Internet wouldn’t arrive on anything like schedule, should we all toss our Blackberries back into the bushes on Monday morning. And so this isn’t just big business anymore; like oil, it’s become our life’s blood. And it’s polluted as hell, but we can’t afford to notice. We can’t afford to notice, until it’s too late to do anything about it. Once it’s too late, we can notice, and that’ll be fine, because we’ll already be screwed, and therefore not responsible. But right now, just as all this stuff’s just set to go absolutely stratospheric, no: no, no, no. Don’t you dare look. Just shut up about it. Oh, look, a pretty birdie…! LA-LA-LA…!

I think a good rule of thumb would be: nothing really serious ever gets done about a problem on a governmental level until food shortages hit. Seriously, if cancer caused food shortages it’d probably be cured by now. Food shortages: where salami tactics turn and start slicing the other way! It is the one thing people will always pick up torches and pitchforks for, the one thing that can topple any government, anywhere. Hey, why do you think Lenin starved his millions? To prove it could be DONE, of course: his greatest proof of success. How proud he must have been. And then after he successfully took away food, he started to take away truth…next step: oxygen! The Soviet Union never did get quite that far, though, and just look where it is now, eh? But once you’ve starved a few million people just for, y’know, kicks…well, you’re pretty much committed to a course of action at that point, aren’t you? At that point you’re sitting on a big time-bomb, basically, I would imagine…

And, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes: hey, thanks for letting me guest-post, BentGuy! Hmm, just thought I ought to get that out there, before you got tired of reading…

But there aren’t going to be any food shortages caused by cellphonoid telegizmos…so the revolution she is not happening I t’ink, senor. Because one thing propaganda’s not any good for is when you’re starving to death…but hey, for everything else it works pretty well! The Internet is “clean”, you know; every piece of hardware that supports it is filthy as smoking itself, but the Internet ITSELF…! Is perfectly clean. Green and enviro, all the day long. This is the same sort of thing you hear all the time. I caught a guy near my place basically driving a truck with a projector mounted on it, shining fashion ads on the sides of buildings. “Guerilla marketing,” he called it, and with the biggest dare-you-to-do-something-about-it shit-eating grin I have EVER seen plastered on his face he told me:

“Hey, it’s just light, right?”

When actually it isn’t, of course. I mean undeniably it is, in fact, light — hell, it’s BRIGHT light, goddamnit! — Asshole! — but it’s nothing like “just” light, it’s also camera, lens, bulb, projector components, computer set-up, office supplies, freakin’ BIG-ASS TRUCK…a can of paint would probably be more environmentally sensitive, once you total it all up. And what “guerilla marketing” means, it means the guy who owns the building that the ads are projected on hasn’t been paid for the use of his space, nobody doing this stunt’s got a permit, he needs to get a police scanner so he can stay ahead of the cops…etc. etc. These guys also powerwash stencils for Telus Mobility — hey, we’re back to cell phones! — into the sidewalk near my house.

“Hey, we’re just cleaning the pavement, right?”

Actually, wrong again; cleaning is what I do to it when I go down there with a wire brush and obliterate your ad. See, now we’re both Boy Scouts! Hooray! I was so inspired by your volunteer efforts to clean up the city that I decided to pitch right in, and in honour of your cleaning pattern I chose one that duplicated it in negative!

What am I gonna do about it. Shessh. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do about it, if I catch him at it again. I’ve going to take the business card he STUPIDLY gave me, and I’m going to take it down to City Hall and I’m going to register a complaint. “Sustainable advertising for a greener tomorrow”, is what it says on the card. “Sustainable advertising”, pfeh. You know, maybe propaganda isn’t good for absolutely everything shy of a food shortage, after all…

But for cell phones that line’s more than likely gonna work. It’s just how you get to the Internet, it’s “just light”, obviously, eh? It’s just a screen and some buttons.

It’ll kill millions, but outside of that it’s harmless.

And this is why governments hesitate to regulate this activity, because just like Lenin they would then be committed to a course of action. Sitting on a time-bomb. Just ONCE regulate it, and you’ve set a precedent for regulating it, you’ve admitted it can cause harm, even though it’s “just light”…that’s where the “too hard to enforce” thing comes from, and the “but hands-free is okay” thing too — it ISN’T too hard to enforce, and clearly hands-free is NOT “okay”, but my God if we can just find one way not to have to LOOK at what the problem is, just for ONE MINUTE MORE…!

Then maybe we’ll be able to say later that we TRIED to do something about it, but y’know WHO KNEW, am I right people?

Big Oil. Of course to you and me they are known by their street name: cars. We totally lost the whole battle over the car thing. Haven’t yet lost the war, but the first few skirmishes, oh yeah. Definitely lost those. And just relatively recently, with the whole helmet thing — and God I’m glad BentGuy’s writing about that, because I swear I never THOUGHT of it before, but it’s all so flippin’ obvious now!! — there was a bit of rhetorical dirty work going on there too. “You’re the ones who aren’t being safe, where are your helmets! I thought you were all “into safety”, but you have no helmets? WHAT A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES, YOU’RE JUST BLAMING THE POOR CAR FOR YOUR OWN RECKLESSNESS…!” Textbook stuff, straight off the playground. No, you are. No, you are. I know you are, but what am I. La-la-la!

Even if somebody gets killed while wearing a helmet, see? “Well, I can’t understand what happened, he was wearing a helmet as you’re required to do, so I guess it must’ve been some sort of FREAK ACCIDENT…”

But I think at some point the time-bomb goes off. And by the way, did you hear? Amazing news: apparently if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, and then bring it slowly to a boil, THE FROG JUMPS OUT! Yeah. Frogs: they’re not stupid, people.

And neither are we.

So here is something we can all do, and it’s easy. Turn to the person next to you wherever you may happen to be, and say this:

“Hey, ever notice that on the news when there’s a car crash, no one ever says whether or not the person driving was on their cell? Maybe that’s because they don’t think to say it. Like, it just doesn’t come up. I mean, if none of the drivers were talking on their phones when they crashed, you wouldn’t mention it, right? It’s be like saying “the driver was fully clothed”, you just wouldn’t say it. So…I guess that means it’s only the people who aren’t on their cell that get into crashes, eh? Like, it’s safer to drive while talking on the phone. It’s safer. It’s SAFER.”

“Anyway, that’s what I told your son and daughter yesterday.”

And just like that, ladies and gentlemen: the frog jumps out.

Hey, thanks for having me!

***

So in case you were all wondering…yeah, that’s what I was doing today. That, and the sandwiches and the limeade, and also a rather nice Belgian witbier now that I come to think of it. Hey, and what timing I had, on Marketplace Wendy Mesley was asking the ex-politician who now heads the Canadian Cellphone-Human Love Association how come their promotional material says “don’t worry about your kids using cellphones, it’s perfectly safe!”. His response: Health Canada has not called it unsafe.

WENDY: Other countries seem to think there’s a risk involved. They issue advisories about kids and cell phones.

FACE-MAN: Well, those are just precautions. Nothing’s been proven.

I leave it to the reader to imagine the ensuing course of conversation. As for me I think it’s probably time I had a snack.

Da Fug

Man, I’ll tellya:  sometimes this apartment’s like a trap.  So many things to not do, and so little time to not do them in…wandering around in a…well…

However I will very shortly be on the hop, and then I think we’ll start to see some action.  Got a post I wrote yesterday pretty much lined up and ready to go…a post I began on Friday trickling down soon after, I trust.  Though it may take a little while longer for that one, because it’s all about how I finally laid my hands on all of Seaguy 2, and then scoured the Internet for commentary, but then got tired and went to bed.

Spine-tingling stuff!

Okay, time to jump.  More directly, Internet.

Topics In Fantasy: Rigoletto, Artesia, Watchmen

What’s the connection, you may ask?

Well, it’s a little bit Shakespeare, and a little bit Kurosawa…and a little bit of something else too.

I think.

Haven’t quite worked it all out yet.  But then again that’s what a blog’s for, so…

Pass me that hammer and them tongs, and let’s get to it!

…And begin with Rigoletto, my first opera.  Just went to it a couple of months ago, and I have to tell you, it was fantastic.

I know, I know…you see no reason to believe me.

But as long as we’re in the land of not-believing, here’s another thing I could ask you to chew on a bit:  which is that opera and comics have an awful lot in common.

No really, they do!

The opera stage is just like a page, you see:  people stand around and exposit in song for minutes at a time, perhaps with an arm raised, and it’s often very boring stuff — “oh no, Father, look out behind that tree…!” — but in the context of the artform it’s tremendously meaningful, charged — CHARGED! — with an almost inexplicable sense of dramatic motion.  Even though no one is moving.  But, well…and we ought to know…

It’s also because no one is moving.

I could tell you a whole lot about my first opera experience, I could tell you a lot about my history with opera as well, but I’ll just tell you this instead:  the opera fans love their thing for exactly the same excellences that we comics fans love our thing for…for the genius of the composition that’s truly arresting, that implies so much movement it’d almost be less thrilling to actually see it…that’s peopled with characters so stock and so sloppy that you couldn’t possibly care about them for their own selves, but that for that very reason they can let a virtuoso execution really shine through.  Comics.  Opera.  There’s a relationship there.  We’re talking about highly stylized forms;  which also means (at least in the popular stuff) very simple forms…and to a degree it’s pretty lowlife stuff.

I mean, take Rigoletto.  A hunchback court jester seething with rage at the aristocrats he amuses, who — SPOILERS! — protects his beautiful daughter, that they all think is his lover….and it all comes out as spite, that earns him a terrible curse.  And he may be out of Victor Hugo, but he ain’t no Quasimodo…and he may make your skin just crawl slightly, but that doesn’t mean he’s Iago either.  And yet what is he, if not a weird and unsettling mixture of those two?  And, not just those two.  Only in comics could you really get away with something like this:  Rigoletto is fifteen different dramatic ingredients thrown into a blender and set on frappe — Rigoletto’s an impossible idea, too unfocussed, spasmic, all over the map, dumb…I mean, he’s gotta be a hunchback too? There’s got to be a curse too? The secret girl has to be his daughter? Oh of course, of course, and yet goddamnit it’s all really too much, and the opera isn’t even that long;  I mean how the hell are you going to cram all that shit in there?  What’s the point of making it so complicated, eh?  Really, it’s TOO MANY NOTES, and what in God’s name is so special about this topic that it needs THAT many notes?  They stop short of giving Rigoletto adamantium claws, but that’s about all the restraint you’re going to get…and in a way it really makes you question why.  Hey, why no adamantium claws, anyway?  Hey, whaddaya some kinda cheapskate?

Away back at the beginning of the Century of Psychology, Freud saw Wagner’s Ring and it stunned him.  Later on, when it met Jung, it practically caved in his skull.  An unconscious part of the mind, good God, do you think it’s possible there might really be one?  Of course the idea goes back a long, long way…at the very least it goes back to Homer, who has Hector address no one in particular, asking:

“But wherefore does my life say this to me?“

But Hector, man, I just can’t answer that one for you.  Who knows why the Gods change their minds?  Whoever it is who knows that, it sure isn’t us.  Though there has by now been a LONG history of people trying to answer your question, we still got nothin’…and we’re probably lucky we’ve even got that much.  But one thing we do have, is a lot more ways of posing the question, than we ever did before:  and you can thank literature and drama for coming up with the idea, and psychology for figuring out that the idea might have hidden bases, and I guess you can thank the modern mind for choosing to dwell on it to such an unhealthy degree, to the point where it clearly wants to just play and play and play with it, like a kid with a mudpie.  Rigoletto himself is a character that’s been done twenty times better…

And yet it’s his very lousiness, it’s the incredibly desultory nature of his “tragedy”…

…That for some reason makes us care?

I’ve said before that pop culture’s chief virtue is its transgressiveness — and make no mistake, the thing called opera buffo is as pop-cultural as any Shakespeare play, which is to say it’s as pop-cultural as anything, anywhere, has ever been.  Up to and including comics…

By which I mean:  it’s surely right up there with us.  Opera and Shakespeare and us:  we’re the trinity of Pop.  Even music has a tough time matching us.

Because even music has a hard time doing what (say) Artesia does.  Oh, Artesia…I think I said this before too, that it is just such a horrifying agglomeration of tips and tricks and cliches that one really couldn’t stand the thing at all, were it not for the fact it’s so obviously made with great passion, as well as with great care.  I’d be a mean man indeed to suggest this comic wasn’t loved by its creator;  and I’d be a meaner one still to dare to suggest it wasn’t pretty well-lathered with skill.  And all for such a silly subject!

It’s mystifying!

Ridiculous gods and maps and names — Artesia puts the ridiculousness right out there and up in your face.  But then again they do say that good artists imitate, but great artists steal — heck, until my friend Tyche shoved it in my face I had no IDEA how much Bob Dylan just flat-out stole, for example…and, yeah, it’s very much our matter, I think.  The recurrent matter of modernity — I mean we forgive Homer and we forgive Shakespeare and we forgive Victor Hugo, but that’s only because we’ve got much bigger problems now, to wit:  what the fuck are WE gonna make, and how can we justify it?  Great artists steal;  artists working from 1985-2009 try to make stealing extra-nice…

Which is probably a mistake, and notably not one that passionate, competent Artesia (I mean ARTESIA, that’s the NAME, for heaven’s sake WHAT?!) even seems to think of.  But then again maybe that passes for a species of genius, in these crazy days…

…Of modernity, I keep saying that…

But, what the hell is modernity?

It’s a slippery term.  You could argue Hector possesses a modern mind, and indeed many stalwarts of the Century of Psychology have done just that;  modernity was certainly, inarguably on the go during the Enlightenment;  and then there’s bloody Shakespeare, and we’re still only talking about the Western Canon.  Look, Bloggers, “modernity”:  better give it up as a hope of something definite, you know what I mean?  I can think of sixteen definitions off the top of my head, that conservatively fit;  there are hundreds more slapdash and off-the-cuff ones that have almost no truth to them at all, except they have a little truth that every other definition lacks…and so I tellya, we’ll be figuring this out ’til the day we die, if that’s what we want to do.  Because it’s bloody complicated…

…From a certain perspective.

I mean, look at Watchmen.  Now there’s a perspective, eh?  Voltaire said that one must be absolutely modern, and that’s exactly what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s work is…it’s about as modern as you can get.  It is obsessed with modernity, in fact;  all the flaws and contradictions, all the little stupid truths and stupid habitual excisions of truth that are SO EMBARRASSING to those of us who are not superheroes…yes.  And the thing is, none of us are.

And another thing is:  the superheroes aren’t, either.

Now there’s your “absolutely modern” — the characters themselves are all but nullities.  Why should we care about them?  An angry girl in a yellow nightie who knows tae-kwon-do.  A rich idiot in an animal costume, with dangerous gadgets, who feels unfulfilled.  A brutal madman in a mask who lives out of an alleyway, eating garbage.  There’s nothing to any of them, and oh God if there really were…

Well who could stand it?

Being a real superhero…

It sounds awful.

“Artesia” wrestles with it, in her way — enmeshed in a million silly and mystifying details, but she’s enmeshed in them.  And so are we, as ridiculous as that sounds.  All trapped in a million cliches, stranded on a million fantasy-maps.  Artesia‘s strength is that it’s just this, yes it really is, and now what kind of story can you tell with it?  Watchmen‘s no different, in fact that’s (pretty inarguably, I take it) the point of Watchmen:  these stylized representations are rather ostentatiously ridiculous, self-cancelling even, as far as fantasies go…but we didn’t make them up, and guess what they do appear to be good for something.  Good at cracking the shell, and getting to the meat inside.  And this manner of feeding isn’t so nice, maybe;  but it’s what we’ve got, and without it there may be no sustenance at all.  Modernity goes back as far as Homer, because Homer is as far back as we can remember:  stories of gods transplanted into tales of human anguish, with God-principles abstracted from them and controlling them, and making a bloody mess that we can’t help but search for some coagulant purpose.  Achilles and Ajax and Demetrious and Nestor:  none of it is original, but then that’s the problem that justifies the story.  Rigoletto is like the freakin’ scrapple of tragedies:  it’s all the leftover bits from everybody else’s story pressed into a loaf, but that doesn’t make it bad, it just makes it a thing you have to eat with the most delicious kind of sauce you can figure out.  In this case:  music, and virtuosity.  Assured performance.  Wonderful execution.  Inspired mise-en-scene.  Without these it is literally nothing;  might as well be a crap Wolverine story.  I mean who cares?  Nothing is so ridiculous as this, after all.  Nothing else carries with it so very little reason to care.

And yet we do care;  and here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing, O Modern Ones, you many Hectors wondering what the hell’s going on!

The transgressive world may be a silly one, but it induces a lot of non-silly feelings that are hard to achieve elsewhere.  We manage to care for Rigoletto, and this is impossible, or at least it ought to be;  it’s like caring for Iago, the one who does ill for ill’s sake because he likes it.  We manage to worry about Artesia, even though — give me a break! — the D&D memory-quilt world she lives in is one where the worst thing that can happen is that she wins.  God knows what we’re supposed to feel at the end of Watchmen, though the superheroic ending is planted right in our laps as plain as day.  Happy for Dan and Laurie?  Well, sure, but not because they’re good characters:  only because they’re sung so well.

And at the end, it’s as though Rorschach gets up and sings a final aria…

And the audience is suitably purged of pity and fear, but it’s not too plain whether or not the good guys have won…if indeed there are any good guys.

Quick lesson in opera to go out on:  the opera we know today is opera buffo, the silly opera:  the common people’s opera.  Where meanings are mixed;  where social conformity isn’t reinforced.  And the “high” opera died the day that opera buffo was born:  prescriptive entertainment, that told you what you should feel, and couched it all in Biblical terms so you couldn’t argue with it.

You see, you’re not supposed to like the “lower” form of this kind of theatre.

But you do, don’t you?

You do care, I think.

This post I had planned for several months;  and the way I had it planned, it was going to be really good.

Oh, well…that didn’t happen, I guess.

Still I hope you may not have thought it a complete waste of time.  And if you did…well, bub…

SNIKT.

Watering The Milk, Part II: The God-Damn CBC

You know, so here we have the late night movie back — which is terrific, because the CBC can show anything they want, uncut, anytime.  MASH was on the other night, and I believe I may have complained about it (my God, I think they cut some swearing, actually;  I mean I hope to hell I’m wrong about that, because they DON’T HAVE TO);  Magnolia was on a while before that, and it was a very trying experience, because there were SO many commercials that it took about FIVE HOURS to watch it.

And then last night, it was All About Eve.

Now, All About Eve happens to be my stock answer for “what’s your favourite movie”, and as such it is a movie whose pace and rhythm I’m intimately familiar with…sort of like most of the better Star Trek episodes, I know when stations cut scenes because I know the dialogue cold, I know how the tension’s supposed to rise, and for how long…I’ve imbibed these things thoroughly.  And you wouldn’t believe what the Star Trek-showing stations I get are in the habit of cutting out, I swear to God…

…But back to Eve.  If you thought it was the most hokey old thing you’d ever seen, you wouldn’t be far wrong, and I wouldn’t deny it:  in many ways it’s a movie most perfectly-suited to fifteen-year-olds who join the Drama Club, which I suppose is one of the more damning things you can say about a movie.  And yet it wouldn’t be that if it didn’t also boast a certain kind of perfection — I’ve often said that what separates an artistically-minded kid from an artistically-minded adult is that kids don’t think as well as adults, but they observe better…and there’s a lot of elegant things to observe in Eve.  It’s a movie full of felicities, enormously neat and tidy and well-drawn, and occasionally the beautiful ease of its flow even threatens to eclipse the amazing fact that you can see Margo Channing thinking, as Bette Davis acts her out…so, somewhat childish, maybe.  But — at least for me — never less than worth watching.

I couldn’t watch it last night, though!

Because everybody knows that one of the worst things about watching a movie on TV is that sometimes it’s hacked-up so much that we cut away to a commercial in the middle of a scene — and you know CBC used to be really good about that, actually? — but this is worse than that by far, and it’s the same thing I complained about with Magnolia and MASH (and, it occurs to me suddenly, The Bishop’s Wife too), but in Eve I could really feel it, because I know that movie’s rhythms so well, and because it really is all rhythm, and if you take that away from it you ruin it.

Not that this sort of thing wouldn’t ruin any movie:  because at one point during my aborted attempt to watch it last night, four minutes of commercials gave way to six minutes of movie, and then another three minutes of commercials immediately following it.  And I defy anyone to enjoy sitting through that anyway, you know?

But when all the commercial breaks are only blocks of in-house advertising for other CBC shows, then you’ve got real problems.  Because then it’s not even about the almighty buck coming in, is it?  But about it going out, instead.  Or in other words:  it’s about being god-damn cheap.  And yet there are so many ways of being cheap, and most of them aren’t as dumb as this.  Anyone ought to know that you can’t cut a movie fifty-fifty with ads anyway, but if you’re absolutely committed to it for some dumbass reason…then still the one thing you would not do, in the ordinary course of bad decision-making, is cut it up fine.  Six minutes of movie sandwiched between seven minutes of advertising.  SIX MINUTES! Surely that crosses some kind of line, of taste or intelligence if not both at once.

It was the best thing on TV, at that hour.  And yet it was unwatchable, even by me, and in fact I only sat still for it even as long as I did because I already knew it.  If I’d been coming to it fresh, I would’ve given up at the beginning of the third commercial break, when I realized I was going to have to sit through that goddamn promo for The Hour again, that that’s what I was being interrupted for, that that’s what was considered urgent here.  Not knowing the movie’s quality, I wouldn’t have had a reason to take this faux-hipsterish face-slapping past that point:  because I wouldn’t've known what I was trying to get back to.  And so even AMC is not this bad.  The old CKVU, with its thirty-minute station breaks full of pictures of tugboats and Chuck Mangione, was not this bad.  This is simply no way to run a railroad.  Unless, that is, your intention is to run it into the ground.

Not that I’m saying the abuse of the late-night movie that’s going on here, stems directly from that intention.  But let no one be so ridiculous as to suggest that the current government doesn’t want that god-damn CBC gone, just about as quickly as it can be managed, and let’s not pretend there isn’t any pressure being exerted in that direction:  let’s not imagine that the atmosphere at the public broadcaster isn’t becoming thicker and denser, in the hope that one day soon it will simply choke.  Ideologues know that the easiest way to persuade people a thing is broken is to break it — and as a rule, any quango exists largely to please its maker.  So would it be going too far to say that the crappification of the late-night movie is a symptom of this particular need to please?  In the ordinary course of the CBC life cycle, a change of government means new sticks and new carrots, tools of a new political mandate that are first employed with vigour, then gradually forgotten about as realism replaces ideology.  But the goal of this government is to break that cycle, so you can forget about the carrots.  Heck, you can forget about the sticks, too.

In quangoes, when times get tough the natural reflex is to circle the wagons.  You can circle them too tightly, though, and that’s when you find yourself using carrots as sticks, and sticks as carrots, in desperation.  Well, if you’re not getting any more carrots or sticks, don’t you have to make the ones you’ve got pull double duty?

It’s a natural impulse;  but in this case it’s a deeply mistaken one.  Because no one is watching the movie for the ads, and so the ads can potentially keep people from watching the movie, which would make the ads worthless, and then what will you do with that promotional platform once its value is gone, and hey whose idea was this anyway?

You would, perhaps, say you have no choice.  And as it happens, you would be right about that:  you don’t.  Because if I’m choosing to turn off the TV rather than watching MASH or The Bishop’s Wife…

Or ALL ABOUT EVE for God’s sake…!

…Then you really don’t have a choice, because this isn’t working, and you’re going to have to try something else.  I don’t want to see the CBC go anywhere;  I think it’s a much better broadcaster than most other people do, I probably watch CBC more than I watch any other channel.  Look, over here:  CBC, I’m your audience, for heaven’s sake…

But I can’t physically tolerate the late-night movie any more.  I can’t watch it;  it just makes me mad.  So how do you plan to replace my lost viewership then, eh?  If you don’t bring me back, you’ll have to find somebody else…will you perhaps start running ads for the late-night movie during The Hour?  That might work, I suppose…hell, you might be doing that already, I wouldn’t know, I dislike The Hour intensely…

But you’re gonna have to do something, I’m telling you.  Because you’ve found a way to make me change the channel away from something I really love, on a station I wholeheartedly support, at a time when there’s nothing else on I want to see, and that can’t be good news.

So just think that over a bit, won’t you?

Frozen Pear Yoghurt, Cherries, Guava Juice, Tuna Sandwiches And Cold Beet Soup…

…Happy Birthday to me.

I’m behind on my reading.

Picked up a few things, got a few more on order:  however today I did remember to visit the LCS to pick up a Batman And Robin.  From a cursory scan of the blogoverse, people like it well enough, but feel a bit disappointed by it.  Not enough action.

Of course where Morrison and Quitely combine, there’s always action:  it’s just stored in a non-standard location.

It’s been a long time since I gave a damn about a Batman comic.  I like Batman fine in the abstract, naturally — just like all the other underwear-clad superpeople of youth — but it’s all the CRAP swirling about those characters’ heads, that has nothing to do with me, that makes me shun the world of floppies.  Today I browsed the racks looking for Seaguy (wasn’t there — gotta order it), and it truly is remarkable how many comics there are that I don’t want to read.  There’s just nothing in them that attracts me:  they’re empty.  And it isn’t like they have to be monumental works of world literature:  the inner eleven-year-old living behind my eyes has very specific needs, but they’re not difficult ones to satisfy.  Batman comics:  I want to care about them.  Just give me a reason.

I liked this one.  Having missed Morrison’s Batman run in its entirety, and not knowing Damien Wayne from a hole in the ground (barring Amypoodle’s wonderful Batman #666)…nevertheless the little punk interests me.  Snot-nosed Robin.  Here my vision splits into two frames:  in the first, I am an eleven-year-old boy looking for identification figures, and one of the notches on that key is definitely snot-nosery — and trust two Brits to remember that so-important element of children’s stories!  Which is, of course, just what this is.  I mean, just look at it.  Look at the title, for goodness’ sake.  “Batman And Robin”.  That’s a kid’s book, though you the experienced comic-reader might be forgiven for missing that fact, due to the look of the thing…but it’s been an awful long time since we’ve had captions and thought-balloons in superhero comics, and although a lot of people seem to regard that as some sort of technological advancement, it isn’t:  it’s just a stylistic choice, and its merits are all site-specific.  Sometimes the merits aren’t particularly in evidence:  a given story might be worse with captions and thought-balloons, but it isn’t really better just because they’re not there.  But this one’s better, because the technique serves the purpose:  that I’m not subjected to Damien Wayne’s inner monologue here is a positive pleasure, because I don’t want to hear what he’s got to say — at least in this first issue, I already know everything I need to know about him.  He’s a little puke, just like me.  And likewise…

…The other frame of my vision is the guy in his forties who’s been buying comics all his life, and that guy isn’t fixated on Robin, but on the Batman who used to be Robin, and then went and did all these other things for a while.  Identification is there, too, and so deeply embedded that it’s hard to think of anything that could ruin it…

…Unless it was being subjected to Dick Grayson’s inner monologue, which I tell you quite frankly is something up with which, after more than three decades now, I will most certainly not put.  Here’s a character who outgrew himself long ago;  outgrew all his own secret thoughts, too.  Honestly, I don’t care about that stuff anymore, and I don’t need to see it.  Really and truly.  Dick and Damien talk to each other, because they have conflicts;  thus, we can actually see the conflicts right there on the page.  And, guess what?  Those conflicts are kind of interesting in their own right.  One identification is a brilliant, stunted child with far too high an opinion of himself — a little aristocratic prick.  The other is a character who’s moped and brooded his way through the last two decades in a way exactly like a brilliant, stunted child with far too high an opinion of himself, who isn’t an aristocratic prick…

…Who’s at last gained a measure of adult self-knowledge, right along with a big fat aristocratic inheritance.  All the Nightwing, Nightwing-and-Robin, and replacement-Batman and Robin stuff we’ve had over the last quite long while now has always seemed a bit…perfunctory, if you were inclined to be generous.  Why doesn’t this guy just get on and do something?  Who the hell is he?  Why is he forever popping up, threatening to be interesting or relatable, only to disappear again two seconds later?  Always a very special guest-star…but then always going off somewhere to play St. Elmo’s Fire with the other Young Adults, every day drawing straws to decide who’s gonna be this story’s Emilio Estevez, who’s going to be the Kiefer Sutherland this week.  But, good heavens, the Seventies are a long way back, now, and so are the Eighties…for most of the time since, this character’s been unable to hold focus effectively for more than ten minutes.  And there’s no reason for that.  He’s just lines on paper, he’s just letters on a screen.  It should be easy to write and draw him well.

But Robin is a character belonging to the 1940s, and Nightwing — “Robin, all grown-up” — is a character belonging to the 1970s.  You can do a couple things with Robin by riffing on what’s gone before — different versions of Robin, reflecting changing times.  But with Nightwing there’s no “what’s gone before”, so there’s no riffing possibilities available.  Once he’s “all grown up”, what’s left for him to do except “grow up some more”?  And yet there’s really nothing there, to hold anyone’s interest for long.  You can do ten years of it.  Maybe fifteen.  But then eventually that well’s going to go dry.

Isn’t it?

Well, it is, and it did, and yet here I am actually interested in what Dick Grayson has to say again, and that’s a remarkable achievement…not least because it ought not to be a particularly remarkable achievement.  One thing Morrison and Quitely never do is skimp on what’s thematically necessary, and they haven’t skimped on it here either — so this is your basic Summer Comic, it practically shimmers with it, and what a relief that is.  I’ve gotten so damn bored with the grim perfection of latter-day Batman, I’ll tellya, folks.  Give me a little Quitely-as-Neal-Adams for a change.  Let’s break a mould, here.  See if this all can’t be made fun again, like it was when we were kids.  A kid’s comic book, by God!  You know, they told me these couldn’t be made anymore.

Now pardon me, I must go and try to get this water-taxi company I know of to take my money.  I think you’d be surprised how reluctant they are to do it!  God knows why.

Or, maybe I should just chuck it, and let somebody take me out for a nice dinner instead?

You know, the older I get, the less time I have for dealing with other people’s procedural bullshit.  That ocean water is calling me, and there’s no doubt about it;  but they’re telling me you can’t get there from here just because it’s where you want to be, and somehow I don’t feel myself in much of a mood to say “I believe you” just because it’ll make their jobs easier.  What about my job?  Which just for today is to not have to buy a pig in a poke if I don’t want to.

The ocean.  I’ll get there tomorrow.  But for today, I’ve got Batman And Robin…

…And a fridge full of goodies.

So maybe I’ll just stay home today, and catch up on that reading of mine.