SORRY!

I’m churning out the posts, I really am…but I find there is something I, after all, can’t wait on.

So here’s the deal.  After 9/11 Canada got its own private Patriot Act, but it was sunsetted.  It expired.  Canada is by no means a perfect country, but we got that right anyway:  our 9/11 civil liberties freakout had a timer on it, we had to re-up if we wanted to go on with that stuff.  I am boiling things down here like you wouldn’t believe, honestly;  there’s so much more than a lot to say about our 9/11 freakout, and the whole thing about whether or not we really did or did not “go to Iraq”, and there are still security certificates and bullshit tough-on-crime legislation and the wiping out of perfectly-decent, if somewhat unspectacular, lives…

But this is what I want to say.  This week our Conservative government brought in another version of our Own Private Patriot Act, and they were given a majority so they got to pass it, and I most sincerely apologize to all my American friends for feeling so superior to you guys about all things Patriot Act for the last ten years or so, because here it is NOT EVEN 9/11 and we are passing the fucker, we are passing it, we are even talking real straight about it but we are passing it, we have passed it, and in a sense we are fucking done.  The newspaper — the right-wing newspaper! — alarmingly said it straight up on the front page:

“The law would curtail Canadian’s civil liberties in exchange for greater security against terrorist threats”

The law would CURTAIL Canadian’s CIVIL LIBERTIES.  That’s how they reported it.  They didn’t even spin it.  Now, there are a lot of motherfuckers in this country, I admit it, but NO ONE is fucking for the curtailment of civil liberties, right?  Yet the government…

…Doesn’t even care what you call it?

So:  pretty bad.  But here’s the thing that’s really got me seeing (you will pardon the expression) red:

The Liberal Party of Canada, third-place in the House…

…Voted with the government.

This should not, I guess, come particularly as a surprise, considering that the Liberals sat as the Official Opposition for five years, against a minority Government, and as far as I could tell did not show up for wotk one time.  Did they Oppose?  Well, let’s just say they abstained a lot.  It’s lost them my vote forever, as a matter of fact.  But, wow, check out their amazing NON-ABSTENTION action fucking here, eh?

The truth is, for all the good they did in Opposition, they might as well have voted with the Government on every issue.  But, y’know…the optics.

So I guess they figure the optics are better now, for voting with the government?

Hey, tell you what, though…my fucking optics are working better than they ever fucking have about you, Liberal Party of Canada.

And if you lost my vote before, well now you’ve lost it and also gotten your hand stuck in the garburator trying to get it out.  How many Final Destinations are we up to, Liberal Party of Canada?

Oh, I forgot…you’re for the fucking pipeline too.

Tell you what:  don’t bother changing course, if you read this.

It’s too fucking late.

Happy landings, you fucking idiots.

Or: “The Internet Strikes Back!”

*

*

Well, howdy-do, Bloggers!

So here is a thing, a thing to understand…a thing that’s taken rather a long time to dawn on me, but it finally has…

Little by little, I am being pushed out.

By “optimization”, you see. Because every time something gets optimized, implicit in the very concept is that something non-optimal gets excluded from its normal operations…and I am nothing, have never been anything, probably never will be anything, if I’m not a Non-Optimal User, so that thing being excluded is what I do, so what is being excluded is me. And it’s a bit natural, I suppose; in point of fact it’s certainly far from unprecedented; and it’s not even very strange that it’s starting to really ramp up now, this process…nevertheless it took me by surprise, and nevertheless it is not what anybody has ever said they mean or meant to do, and nevertheless it’s really kind of dumb. Because how much of life can we really live through, folks, without acknowledging that there really probably is no Third Way in a game designed to be zero-sum? I mean, you can get Third Ways, I think; it’s just that you can’t get them without giving something up, and that something has to include at least zero-sumness…

So the white matter being finally deemed less sheerly profitable than the grey, its incipient connections, its connections-of-incipiency, are cautiously carved from the bulk of cognitive operation, and set on a separate platter to cool and waste…

…And so welcome all Bloggers, to my farewell to Twitter! Never again will such a time come, when after being burned by one social-media Thing I turn to another and expect it to be different! And I have to admit that it’s that very fact that makes me so reluctant to go…because this isn’t just the end of Twitter, for me.

No.

But perhaps I’d better explain how it all happened, anyway.

One day I looked at the screen and noticed that I had “tweeted” TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES…and after rolling around those zeroes on my tongue for a bit, I figured that might translate to something perhaps over a hundred thousand words? A hundred thousand words that could’ve been set down elsewhere, a hundred thousand words that is Twitter’s to do with pretty much as they will, instead of my own, my very own and no one else’s. It’s quite a lot of work to not get paid for, if you want to think of it that way, although I wasn’t totally sure that was the way I wanted to think about it…until the news came that Twitter had sold the last two years’ worth of the total Twitter output to some data-miner, and that decided me.

My account was locked; private. In theory no one could sample it and use it to make a buck. I was invisible to evil things like Klout, for example?

I think?

But to Twitter I was not invisible, and when they did their big sale they included me in it…which means all the stuff I thought I escaped through trying to be a “responsible Twitter user” was stuff I actually didn’t escape at all…and it means money for someone else now, my twenty thousand tweets, in some way or another. If some marketing company had asked to “follow” me, I would’ve declined to allow them to! But if they wanted my data anyway, they could go over my head to Twitter with a fat cheque in hand. And, I know…

…Some may say that was the bargain I made going in. Well, those people are right, of course! But that doesn’t mean I have to stay if I don’t like the bargain anymore. An online community is a fine thing, a fine and helpful thing, but on the corporatized Internet the thing to remember is that it isn’t your online community. It belongs to someone else. It takes place on their premises. There’s a contract, all of that. The system belongs to them, and they get to decide what to do with it; all you get to decide, is how you feel about it. And for myself, I feel like I can’t tolerate generating any more chatter, that to me is just chatter with my peers, but that to Twitter is stuff to roll up in lots and sell off to whomever, to be that person’s asset — and not mine — forever and ever. At first, it seemed like not much to lose, and anyway as long as I kept my account locked I wasn’t losing it; and if it all got sent to the Library of Congress to be part of some public record then I didn’t mind that. And if Twitter parsed and tweezed and analyzed my words along with everyone else’s in order to produce some kind of snapshot of aggregate data, well, I didn’t really mind that either. But for Twitter to collect me for someone else to parse and tweeze and analyze, for money, this is a different story…and twenty thousand tweets is rather a lot of me to be in someone else’s pocket, and so that makes it a different story too…and besides…

It isn’t just Twitter. All these platforms run in about the same way, they have the same rules and the same provisos, and ultimately the same philosophy about whether it’s permission or forgiveness one should be most concerned with being able to lay one’s hands on at need. Google is certainly a past master at this, picking up whatever isn’t nailed down and claiming they thought it had been discarded there. Books. Faces. Sunbathers on the roof. Ironic, isn’t it, that you can’t own the signal content of microwave radiation that passes through your actual physical body, but that whatever Google can see it feels free to make off with? Well, integration and ideology have their own logic; I am not sure that I was ever informed I could delete my Google blog by means other than deleting it, but as it turned out this was perfectly true, and I could. I’m sure the reason no one mentioned it was because they reasoned optimization is always a good thing, because, y’know: optimal…and therefore to want to get rid of just part of Google was a crazy insane want, since wasn’t the whole point to make Google a monolith? A highly desirable monolith. In a strange way this reflects the values of libertarian New Atheist tech billionaires very well, since the New Atheism employs the same questionably self-stabbing sort of defence as this: hey, if you don’t want Darwin then you shouldn’t get Pasteur either! Not that I’m entirely unsympathetic to that somewhat-vindictive view, but I’m also conscious of the fact that this is the same sort of shit that religious nutjobs pull all the time…adolescents pull it too, when they want things their own way, as when do they ever not…while sensible adult religious people scrupulously avoid pulling it, so why in the world would scientists employ this kind of umbrella defence, this defence of a monolith? This monolithic umbrella defence? Sure, we’ve gotta keep the rain off, but surely there’s a better way to do it than balancing a hundred tons of rock above our heads on a stick? No, fuck you, you take all of it or you take none of it!! You believe Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days exactly or there’s NO GOD AND YOU GO TO HELL…!

So it’s fairly revealing in general, this sort of stance…in a Phil. of Sci. way, but forgive me, I forget we’re not talking about Phil. of Sci. now, are we? But only about how all these online services tend to operate in the same way, rather as a flock of swallows flies. Ultimately, I believe, it’ll be their very drive for optimization that brings them low, as they dispense with hard-to-quantify diversity in favour of smallification…the only reason I used Twitter as long as I did was because I found a third-party client for the visually-impaired, as some of you may recall me saying a hundred times or so. They can’t keep it simple, because they don’t know what they’ve got but they don’t want to lose it; Twitter didn’t do “feature creep” it did “overnight bloat”, and Facebook started out as a bunch of crap that cluttered up your view of the bunch of crap it was cluttering up your view of, and every day they throw another shovelful on and every day they fail to understand what people use their product for…which, really you can’t blame them for that, since the users don’t know either, but even so. Even so.

Even so.

There are lots of ways in which I’m a non-optimal user. I like looking at lists instead of running searches, and I’m more likely to buy something I see in a non-targeted ad than in a targeted one. I don’t like the “desktop”; I want a GUI that looks like a bookshelf instead. Word processors make me scream. I write 6,000-word blogposts. I write 6,000-word emails, from which (in case you don’t know) words occasionally disappear as the computer does the other things it’s got to be doing while you type. I don’t like the word “email”, or “e-mail”, or any of the ways you can spell it: I think it’s a joke that got out of control, much like the word “blog” itself. I used to be an eccentric, and now I’m just a curmudgeon. But, the thing to understand is, it isn’t me who’s changed…!

But it’s the computers that got cranky. A couple of years ago I found myself wondering out loud at a young friend: “what am I going to do about the Internet?” She probably thought I sounded nuts, but it is a good question, because…uh, all actions are ultimately taken by individuals? I don’t know, maybe that sounds screwy after all…I mean, obviously I do not head a large tech company, I am not in the government, at first blush it seems like there’s very little I can do “about the Internet”…but then, I never said I could do much, I just strongly implied I must do something, and I still believe I must do something. I can’t so much as get a word-processor that works for writing, but that just means I’ll have to aim lower, won’t I?

What am I going to do about the Internet?

It’s slowly turning kind of evil. I would ask if you’ve noticed this, Bloggers, but of course everyone has noticed it, we all know it and we know we know it. How evil is Apple? They don’t even want you using the Internet; they want to use it for you. How evil is Google? They want to take all your data for the greater good. How evil is PayPal? How evil is Amazon? How evil is Facebook?

How evil is Twitter?

Well, we don’t know about Twitter yet, but it’s not looking too sunny, and all the trends are against them. The flock of swallows has a delightfully flexible pattern of flight, but its rules are rigid! Twitter must follow suit with whatever is going, as everyone else must too. Kickstarter must do it, even as YouTube, even as Microsoft. No one is free, though that’s what the Internet used to be all about. And it seems quite apparent to me that the rate of change for the worse is accelerating. “Social media”, that shit’s out of control, you know? It’s blowing up all around us. The train is slowly smashing into the other train. All these tiresome people (like me) are forever quickly whipping up some half-baked soggy pancake of an opinion (like this one!) to try to explain it all, to help put it in perspective…but truthfully, these are still such early days, the perspective is still quite a long ways down toward the other end of the telescope. Twitter has been tremendously useful to me, and also the most terrible time-sucker…it’s not going to be easily replaced, and I’m going to really miss talking to all the people! But that I’m going, this isn’t the fault of those people. Heck, it isn’t even really my fault! Did I make Twitter?

I don’t even have the power to make a decent word-processor appear.

Some of you may know this: about fifteen years ago or so, I gave up having a bank account. I couldn’t afford the fees, you see! So I just gave it up. This seems STRANGE by the standards of 2013, I know…I get asked all the time how I managed to live, how did I manage to do the most basic things, how I managed to get paid for heaven’s sake, without a bank account. The answer is a bit boring…

It’s just that, fifteen years ago, you could do such things.

Because the system would let you.

And now…it won’t. Or, it mostly won’t. Well, it’s for sure that getting paid is tougher, anyway! And the rest of the world is like this too, there are all kinds of little ways that are being gotten rid of all the time, and you have to be a stainless steel rat now. Theft is easy, by comparison with getting by through using the “little ways”. Theft technology is always improving, after all; theft is a boom industry, resolutely modern. Well, think about it, it’s actually easier to scam a thousand dollars with a debit card, than to cash an actual cheque…

And: AHA! Back on topic. So anyway, there was this thing that happened: I was going to donate to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. The street team folk they hired approached me, and I said I didn’t have a bank account at the moment but was anticipating getting one again soon (“but then how do you pay for your credit card purchases?”), and when I did I’d be happy to donate, and would they call me again in a couple of months. Which they did. But you see, what I didn’t understand about all this, was that many charitable donations are now apparently made exclusively by automatic withdrawal. But, dinosaur that I am, I thought I could write them a cheque!

Hell, I thought that’s what we were talking about!

But it wasn’t, so I never did donate. They were a little annoyed, I guess, at how such a little thing could cause me to abandon my plan to donate. They explained to me that the automatic withdrawal really wasn’t what it sounded like, didn’t work the way I seemed to think it did. And I said: really?

You mean, in the fifteen years I’ve been away from banking, they changed the mechanism?

“Yes, yes! It’s different now!”

However actually it isn’t any different, but instead it’s exactly the same. I know this because I checked, and believe me checking was not an easy thing to do, since young people who work in banks are really not very well-informed about how the bank does business. They all think the mechanism’s different now, too! But the only thing different about it is that young people accept its workings much more uncritically. So just as you let the computer remember your passwords for you, and you leave JavaScript turned on, and you accept third-party cookies, you also give other people regular access to your bank account, and place your faith in the contract you have between you. But, it still isn’t safe for you, you know? Because the contract doesn’t protect you from the breaking of the contract, anymore than helicopters flying overhead can prevent oil spills. But instead it all — bottom line — costs time and money to clean up. I have six or seven different passwords, and I change them all up regularly, and enter them labouriously by hand each time I do anything at all that technically requires them…and nobody knows what they are, and they’re not written down anywhere. In a like fashion, a lot of older people don’t use automatic withdrawal precisely because it can bite you in the ass and everyone talks a lot of inaccurate shit about how it works, shit that absolutely stops mattering once it doesn’t work. We make acts of payments, instead; it’s more secure that way, and you never have to hang on a voicemail tree waiting for the relevant person to talk to you about why something fucked up, that wasn’t supposed to. How, thinks the relevant person, could it have fucked up in the way you describe? When it isn’t supposed to! So there’s every possibility that you’re not telling the truth, in the Relevant Person’s mind, and this slows things down a LOT, and most importantly doesn’t do anything to rectify your problem. A secret of modern banking is this:  that everyone thinks about types of fraud that never happen, just about all the time…so if you do things in a non-standard way, if you want others to do things in a non-standard way, some sort of suspicion inevitably falls on you. Yet, look, we have these things called cheques, right? They’re still out there, they still function as part of the money supply, promissory notes will always function as part of the money supply…they haven’t actually been made obsolete yet!

The guy on the other end of the phone is starting to get a little perturbed. This auto-withdrawal stuff is totally safe, just as he’s been trying to tell me; I shouldn’t let some antique prejudice stand in the way of making a donation that I, after all, have already said I wish to make.

But, I point out to him that I am not letting it stand in the way. It is not standing in the way. Because cheques are real, and I like paying for things with cheques, and it’s my money. I like handling my money in a particular way, in a particular way that exists and is legitimate for me to choose, and it’s my money. So it isn’t my fault that his organization is not set up to handle cheques; and it isn’t his fault either. Neither of us made this world, neither of us chose to arrange things in such a way that I have money in my hand and am holding it out to him — he has made his sale! — yet he cannot take the money because it is not the right kind of money, or rather it is not the right kind of the right kind of money, for him to take. So it isn’t his fault, and it isn’t mine: we would each consummate the relationship if we could, but we can’t. Because the system won’t allow it.

It’s been optimized, you see.

Nothing has changed, about the legitimacy of cheques!

But the activity surrounding them has been artificially depressed.

And so it is with Twitter, just as it is with Facebook and PayPal and Amazon and Apple and the elements of the Googleplex and all the rest of it. Twitter was a simple tool, that’s gotten complicated: like an electric hammer, it’s now extremely excellent for hammering a shitload of tenpenny nails under ideal conditions, and not good for one other thing besides that. If you are an Optimal User of the electric hammer, then things are only getting better and bettter for you…but if you’re a Non-Optimal User, there’s the door. Because diversity means robustness, but there’s no such thing as “high performance” robustness: that would be a contradiction in terms. Robustness is staggered cycles, multiple overlaps, different clock-speeds, slow transmission, and lots and lots of redundancies; robustness is not one signal flashing over every node in a system in a microsecond, it is not by its nature a thing of efficiency, but it is a thing that (from a certain point of view) impairs efficiency. Frank Herbert got at this very presciently with his “BuSab” stories back in the late 60s and early 70s — the Bureau of Sabotage, set up with the mandate to slow the wheels of government, thus reducing the damage the juggernaut might cause. We might think of this today in a variety of connections, for example the “generation gap” that affects judges and legislators in the deadly two-step of computer-industry regulation…where it isn’t that there are no preexisting legal and moral principles to apply to our 21st-century questions about digital automation, but it’s that older people haven’t kept their knowledge-sets updated about such things, and younger people are for the most part uncritical swallowers of the company line. Which uncritical swallowing, don’t get me wrong, results not from any deficiency in the good sense of young people…but it’s that the thinking of the tech world’s billionaire class is saturated in pure ideology, and they’re not shy — and not stupid, either! — about loading every message they can with subliminal political content. So the only thing to separate the younger people from the older, really, is that the young people already have the experiential tools with which these ideological biases could be interrogated…but they’re not very practised at this kind of interrogation, whereas the older bunch who are more practised at it simply haven’t got the tools in the first place, and don’t even know how to get them, because they haven’t done the necessary readings, and the necessary experiments, to begin to know where these might be purchased. Thus the Bureau of Sabotage would find a lot of decent employment in this, the Gap Year of the software industry! But unfortunately BuSab is a fiction, so bad laws get passed very quickly, and judges are slow to catch up to them, and all we have to rely on to slow the wheels is that fortunately-plentiful gummy substance known as human stupidity…

But where was I. Ah, yes! Optimization. Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of them, and how the Internet is pushing me out. But it’s not just me! I’m just the canary in the coal mine, the Eternal Suboptimal for whom even good things rarely work properly: full of non-standard desires and off-script complaints. But you feel it too, don’t you? Even if it’s not yet making you keel over in your cage? Social media: it may not actually be a good thing, as currently constituted. The primary currency of the Web is, always has been, and probably always will be conversation…but accusations of “sociality” may just be a sort of spin, that attempts to make conversation into something other than it is. Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed “sociality” as an anthropological principle that one could make a sort of Moore’s Law prediction about — and who better to hold forth about anthropology than a programmer? — the idea being that “sharing” is and always has been increasing over time, and that the secret of Facebook’s success is that it gave people a way to share better. Man is born sharing, if you will, yet everywhere he is prevented from knowing what his neighbour had for lunch yesterday…complete garbage, of course, when the real secret of Facebook’s success is that it TRICKED people into sharing what they would ordinarily keep private, and is not Facebook’s one-and-only asset really no more than a very large list of True Names? The flock of swallows darts and dodges; now Twitter wants your true name as well, now Google must have it, now everyone demands it. Unwanted information about others intrudes into the act of self-expression so cherished as a outlet valve, a way of experiencing the flexibility that so often the ordinary working day won’t give us…intrudes into the experience of freedom, as though to have it one must accept various other arbitrary predicates about its availability, its permissibility, its societal justification, by God…! As though to have it, one must be part of a group, that is defined by some other person’s will. Twitter, you know, started out its life as just a sentence you could post, with the option to add a link. That’s all. Even the verification of celebrity identities came later; in the beginning, it was just a hammer. Just a hammer, sitting on a bench, and anyone could use the hammer.

But just look at it now!

A friend remarked (though it may have been a retweet), that while Facebook is a place where you talk to people you already know, but with whom you have nothing in common, Twitter was a place where you talk to strangers who share your interests. And this was what made Twitter a sort of anti-Facebook, for a time…for a time...and thus something I found irresistibly valuable. But the flock demands just a certain type of competition, you know? Actually, if I were the head of the NSA I would be really annoyed right now…all this conformity of competition would have me on a slow burn. I’d be especially furious with Mark Zuckerberg! I’d call him up and say, “buddy, buddy, if you wanted money why didn’t you just ask for it? Why take the damn thing public, don’t you know you could’ve crashed the resource?!“

“If the intelligence community propped up American Impressionism, do you think it’s beneath us to prop you up?”

The interesting fact of the matter being that it wouldn’t harm the intelligence community’s interests much to just shower free money on social media, with no strings, in a post-Patriot Act world…would it? Strings are no longer necessary, so here’s some money, don’t worry about monetization, if we want the information we will take it, but in the meantime don’t you want to be an American success story? Don’t you want to own an island like Marlon Brando? Do charitable works…summer in the Hamptons…hey, go nuts, kid…

My brother thinks that’s all the sheerest fantasy, by the way: pure conspiracy theory. But I say, “what, you think the brass of the NSA are bad at their jobs?“

“You don’t think, if they acted as Angels for the Impressionists in Venice CA, they wouldn’t act as Angels for the start-up kids in Mountainview or wherever?”

But anyway…the truth is, maybe they aren’t really that good at their jobs, because the growth of the social-media graphs is really just that: growth. Just pure growth, pure connection-making, drawing more and more lines between more and more dots, decreasing the notional distance between profiles. And this really isn’t the way to wring information out of the True Names most efficiently, by simply forcing growth…is it? When there could be so much more interesting stuff to manage, in a wilder crop as well…

But whatever, whatever, anyway anyway, pardon me! I am getting off-topic. All this stuff isn’t why I’m leaving Twitter! I don’t really care about the NSA and the CIA and the LSD and the U.S.A, you know? I can’t affect any of that, I don’t have the power to make choices about any of it outside the voting booth, right? I mean, I am a guy who enjoys living in a cabin in the woods, and I would definitely live in one, but I wouldn’t be there for political reasons, if you catch my drift! But I would be there pretty much exclusively for the wood-chopping and the sunsets. And in the meantime I am not there, but I am here in the world of cities and infrastructures, setting up a little e-shack online to chop a different sort of wood. Freedom…self-expression…conversation…community, over the last seven or eight years I have really grown to love my online communities, I love the people in them and the possibilities too. And Twitter has only been second to this blog, for delivering to me the joy of online community, but the thing about Twitter is…

The thing about Twitter is…

…Is that Twitter is no longer happy just to leave hammers lying out on benches, for anyone to use. And as a result of that, Twitter is making me think really a lot harder than I would normally wish to, about how much my community is also Twitter’s cash cow.

Twenty THOUSAND tweets!

Twenty thousand of them, and if I don’t stop soon it’ll be thirty thousand, and then fifty thousand, and they’re all so much Bitcoin, to Twitter. Yet, I still don’t want to go. Yet, I still can’t stay. And it bugs me a lot, that I’m trapped between these two bones, but then I remind myself…

I didn’t make things this way.

And Twitter has real negatives, too, it occurs to me once I start thinking about it, once I start thinking about it…for one thing, as I have said previously, Twitter bleeds away my impulse to write for other platforms. This relative flurry of posts around these parts recently, those have been brought about merely by me thinking about leaving Twitter, you know? And in the course of an ordinary day, having decided (almost wrote “deicided”) (!) to leave Twitter has opened up fresh vistas of free time for me as well…why I even went for a run today, and that’s something I haven’t done since I was in Grade Eight!

Swear to God!

And as well, there is the recent study (sorry, link not handy) describing how the e-multitasking that comes with being active on various different platforms gradually makes people more likely to experience depression. On Twitter, I thought aloud about this a bit…wondering, is it not a bit like the trouble of addiction? Is it not like chasing the dragon? At first, being a creature of split attention and multiple aspects is transporting, invigorating, wildly exciting…but then, inevitably, the feeling of importance and of significance becomes subject to the Ramp Effect, as you’re forced to split your attention more every time, to get the same high. Plugged-in! Wired-up! Wired not Tired! And you know what it is to be Bryce in Max Headroom, you know what it is to be all the Oracle-like support people in RVs and underground bunkers and on satellites in TV shows…like Ozymandias in front of his screens, but for you it’s even better because the watching is an active process…!

But then soon enough, the whole thing becomes work, just work. Frazzledness; tunnel-vision. And the dragon gets farther away the longer and harder you chase it, and you forget just what it is you’re doing all this for…

…Unless, that is, it is your work, and then I don’t know how the calculation goes. I suppose, if Twitter is useful to you for your work, then it just tips the scales just slightly, and gives you a reason to stay? I had a friend who used Facebook entirely for organizing her political activism, saying “oh, it doesn’t matter if they track me, I’ve seen my CSIS file, it’s about six inches thick…I figure they tap my damn phone, for me there’s no downside that I’m not already experiencing anyway…!”

So everyone’s calculation is different, true enough. And there are all kinds of Suboptimal out there.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still the canary in this coal mine, and it doesn’t change the fact that Twitter has its negative side. More than a few friends of mine talk about the uselessness of political discussions on Twitter, the massive blood-surge of frustration and anger…and then there are the petty public squabbles, the defriending and unfollowing and disliking. And, that’s all just with the “hammer” version of Twitter! Some of you probably know the circumstances surrounding my deep and severe quitting of Facebook, how I got a Quiz one day from a friend — well, from Facebook telling me it was a friend, which is a significant difference really — and actually it was her young son who sent it along, because Facebook teaches kids to click “I Agree” without thinking too much about it…

I’d had a discussion with another friend, actually, about the Terms & Conditions of Facebook and whether they were scary or not…and I had determined, myself, that while they sure as hell looked scary, as long as you were okay with putting up your True Name in the first place that everything else was probably not that bad in comparison…

…But I hadn’t anticipated receiving this Quiz, and then halfway through completing it realizing it was actually just an attempt to phish my medical information. And right then, I realized that if this could happen, then Facebook must be just about as evil as the day is long, and I needed to get off of there. So I tried the gimmick a friend of mine had stumbled on a week previously, where resetting your birthdate at Jan. 1st, 1900 made Facebook sufficiently mad at you that (in accordance with the T&C) they had every right to kick you out and delete your profile…

…But one week on, Facebook had plugged that loophole, so I had to wait for the Supreme Court of Canada to rule that Canadian citizens could not be debarred from deleting their Facebook profiles if that’s what they wanted to do…

See? Everything that isn’t nailed down, that’s what they feel entitled to take…

…And so eventually I was able to leave, and deprive them not necessarily of the information I had entered, but at least I was able to deprive them of the ability to call me a Current User…the ability to interpret even my inactivity, anyway, and believe me when I say: that’s not nothing.

But my reasons for leaving Twitter are a bit more straightforward. Twitter sold me to a data-miner (oh, how the head of the NSA must’ve hit the ROOF!!), and I’m simply not okay with that, so I’m leaving. My Twitterfriends say they don’t want me to go. Some of them are even perhaps slightly annoyed at my determination to go. Am I not — essentially — leaving them?

Am I not showing some sort of vague disdain for our community?

But I’m not leaving them; and really, I’m not even leaving it. I’m only leaving Twitter. One day soon, I have no doubt, Twitter will collapse, as Facebook will collapse, as all the increasingly-calcified and crypto-authoritarian social-media platforms of this day will collapse. But the community, the conversational partners, will continue on…and simply meet up somewhere else. Somewhere less toxic, somewhere less overdetermined. Somewhere less slowly-going-wrong, and somewhere there are fewer Smoke Monsters lurking to turn it all to shit. Somewhere just a bit more, I don’t know, a bit more “Internetty”? All these social-media places, they’re very un-Internetty, even disgracefully so…central switchers, server farms, but you know that is not what the Internet was built for, the Internet was built for routing around massive physical damage in a flexible way…Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of them, they’re just versions of the World Wide Web itself that are myopically ring-fenced and micropaid. God, just imagine if Tim Berners-Lee had been like Mark Zuckerberg! “I have this great new thing called the World Wide Web, it’s an excellent device for turning you all into Matrix-like commodities BUT THERE ARE PICTURES…!“ I know I am ranting and ranting and raving and raving here, guys, I know that…I know that, and you have my apologies. It’s just that it’s not easy to give up this side of my online community, even if I know it can really only be just for a while. Let me just say to the NSA and the CIA and the LSD and the USA…look, I don’t blame you guys. This isn’t your fault either. I was okay with you surveilling me, I knew it going in and I know it going out too. Your evilness is of course endlessly-debatable, and if I’m honest I come down on the side of “oh fuck yes, they’re evil as shit”, but nevertheless YOU were a trade-off I was willing to make…

But meanwhile to the corporatized Internet at large, I have this to say:

Dude. Get your shit together.

Do you even know how many products and services you’ve got, that I won’t use? Online payment systems are a particularly thorny problem, since PayPal has allowed themselves to become politicized in the wake of the Wikileaks blockade, and Google probably does have some viable alternative but then again it’s not like they aren’t planning to summon Gozer the Destructor in late August of 2015. So, I could so easily be part of GDP, but instead I’m opting out, you know what I mean? So just for the sake of my own sense of ethics — and because your lack of ethics is standing in my way — I am forced to write my MP and the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and the CEO of Canada Post, and demand such a thing as an “e-money order”? Canada Post of course can have no infinitely-plastic Terms & Conditions, you know…they have rock-ribbed federal statute instead. And you guys have had it very easy thus far, in your Gap Year…right?

People pounding corn down in the steel canyons of what used to be Manhattan…it won’t come to that.

But one day soon, the young people with all the experiential tools, sons and daughters of computer folk, that class of tech-savvy youngsters who every one of them grew up online…one day soon they’re going to find themselves fundamentally unsatisfied with the Internet options they’ve been given, and in that day you will find that all the AOL people really and truly have disappeared. It’s actually happening now, you know?

It’s just that you don’t care to see it.

Though the canary drops over dead in its cage.

Online community is something you don’t know you can’t live without, until you have it. To add any community to yourself, is great. Feels great. Twitter, for example, is excellent. Facebook is excellent too, and oh Shelly H. from high school if you’re out there…! My old and much-missed, very much-missed girl. I left Facebook, because I understood it enabled evil, on the very day I found you on it. Facebook tempts, and Twitter tempts, for their dancing girls sway to and fro….but actually I can’t talk about it much anymore. There’s no point talking very much more about it. Is there? I am simply a Suboptimal User, and I am being pushed, slowly but surely pushed, to the margins. Though no one else but me appears to see it, this is the most dramatic excision I have ever seen. In one way or another, everyone I know and/or love online is being pushed out of someplace…

But of course, you know? Because this is the GAP YEAR of information technology. This is where they scoop things up, or shit things out, mostly unregulated, because no one cares or no one knows, or no one knows to care, or cares to know. Me, I’ll keep the WordPress blog because I trust the WordPress people. For now. But I don’t really trust any tech company, anymore…do you?

And if it’s even anything that can be called “social media”…then from now on NO THANKS, eh? Because this is the biggest and most fertile and most fucking heartless of a field for scamming, that I’ve ever seen in my life…

Though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico.

Listen. I fucking MISS Shelly, all right? I miss her more than I could ever express to any one of you. That girl’s a part of my soul. And because I quit Facebook I will never see her again.

But: it’s worth it. And she would agree.

If she knew.

And so I offically quit Twitter, as well. As of this moment. To my Twitterfolk, I hope we can still be friends…

But this is the end of me and Twitter. For real.

And though I will stop short of urging you to quit it as well (after all, everyone’s suboptimal calculation is different!), I will say this: that if you feel like you’d be somehow letting me down by quitting it…

Well, you wouldn’t be.

Because, of course…

I’m already gone.

It was a while ago, Bloggers, when I was privileged to be asked to read a script from Project: Ballad by its author, the illustrious Michael Peterson. It struck me as a rather curious thing, all about a fandom (and a powerful cultural current!) that I’m not part of and not familiar with: the gamer world. And also it was set at a convention, and conventions are things I generally don’t go to.

But, the boy in the Prologue seemed familiar…

All stories set at our sort of conventions owe a strange and somewhat hairy debt to Larry Niven, I think — the man who chose to make a mini-career out of writing cons large across the cosmos, adolescent concerns cosplaying on luxury space barges, interplanetary trade missions, and chatter in the bar elevated to grand Galactic drama. The blasted hookups in the elevators all dignified and dignifying, the panels all Algonquin Round Tables…the outcome never in doubt. Such legendary beings. These are the times, and we are the people! Though the world may not see us yet, and our miraculous gallimaufry is hardly even heard of. Inside the bazaar, representatives of alien cultures meet, and just as in a science fiction story they secretly know one another to be of the same kind. Play-acting; but then what’s wrong with play-acting? To step into a role is a common enough sort of thing for people to do, as soldiers, students, and CEOs…and these are just more imaginative roles that we’ve got in here. Often, in the outside world, social roles are tremendously confining, sources of terrible hurt and want…

…But in here, they’re recontextualized. In here, your role sets you free! And so all the message-board stuff, that cheap substitute for expensive community, is mere build-up…the private obsession with one’s own world and one’s own desires, one’s own imperatives locked in a screen in the palm of one hand, the hard work of gaming, of figuring out puzzles and puzzling out identities, that liberates us from a solitary confinement to another but better sort of solitary confinement, this too is mere preparation. Hmm, and maybe I do know this stuff, better than I thought…

…But being just a bit too old to have entered into the gaming world as I otherwise might’ve, I’ve never seen it this way before. What a strange window, giving out onto such a strange pastureland! It may be all second nature to Michael (well, that’s the idea, isn’t it?) but I can sense his second nature making the story as special to him as it is to me: to him it’s distillation, concentration, the hard winning of theme from a life of personal experience…as to me it’s exploration, comparison, the extraction of things I hardly know I know until I recognize them, but either way something is going on here that’s important to both of us. And I suppose we’re both equally a little bit surprised, in our own separate ways, across the gulf of time that separates those born into gaming from those who just missed that boat? Surprised at just how effective all this metatextual stuff is?

How relevant?

Thirty-four years ago, a boy is lost. The Prologue did, I have to say, hit me oddly — so oddly that for a brief time I wondered how it was bloody well possible for Michael to know my city so well, as it was when I was young! And of course as it turned out that was all just a mistake on my part, but still the associations linger because it’s all…to be honest, it’s all pretty close to something real. Those deserted half-woods, in my city at that time were places with very long histories indeed, filled with strange deserted totems left over from the War long ago, and my father’s childhood…marks and signs of other fugitive inhabitants seeking escape, too…and from way back when, the history of the people who originally owned that land in the part of Vancouver I thought Michael was somehow able to talk about, and who still own it now, but it’s very different now from then. And then lying over all of it, invading it from the fringes, this eternal patch of waste and escape-hatch Never-Never Land, the steady creeping cloud of second-stage suburbanization, that most Seventies of things…bulldozers and culverts now abandoned totems too, but not for long. So, about the gaming I may not know, but there’s definitely a world here to which I’m not an alien…

But, enough about me. As it turns out, Michael is quite a fine writer — the ancillary material at P:B (the P:B Apocrypha?) is more than worth your time, and there’s every indication it’s also part of the story, and also part of the “game process” that suffuses every aspect of this thing — with a nice ability to juggle talking-heads ensemble-cast scenes with sufficient adeptness that you’re never forced to recall that this sort of thing kind of irritates you, actually. Well, Hemingway said “never confuse motion with action”, and the long period of introductions to the cast shows that the reverse is also true: all that’s happening here is introduction, but it’s more than just ticking boxes, more even than just trying to jazz up the ticking of boxes, but the process itself is an enjoyable one that comes with a side-helping of meaning…meaning that extends beyond merely understanding the various persons and their various relationships. Because this is a webcomic, and therefore one among thousands if not tens of thousands, we might be forgiven if we don’t notice the craft — at least, not the craft in the writing — because we are probably not meant to fixate on it for good solid commercial reasons. And, maybe even good solid artistic ones? As with a game (one assumes), the top level of engagement with a webcomic is light diversion, mild interest, a reason to come back that you don’t have to think about too deeply…you know there’s a mystery here, and you can even roughly sense what you think is its shape, but on the surface it’s tropes and twists and snazziness, so the one thing you are not being especially primed to notice is the pacing. Michael would modestly say that’s all Kevin Czapiewski, the artist of the piece, and seeing the quality of Kevin’s work you swiftly get used to giving him credit for things…but some pacing is always in the script, too, and Michael manages (in my opinion) a deft and tricky job with it. To compare the ancillary material to the comic is to see, for example, that he’s got a whole different set of chops than what he’s showing out the front of the store; Carla Speed McNeil is recalled to me here, the easeful gabfest and the light play with tropes and reader attention concealing something much more meticulously worked-out than it would appear at first blush…and something a bit more serious than it appears, as well. I am just old-fart chauvinist enough to have been surprised that a story about some swords-and-sorcery game possessed any hint of philosophical depth, myself…psychological depth is something I think a good writer can find anywhere, manufacture out of anything at hand, but philosophy takes a bit more work and a lot more obsessiveness, in my experience. And yet game play, game design, game immersion, this is all very fit meat for philosophers; it’s just that we haven’t seen much of that philosophy in fictional form.

So…is it an ambitious project? At least…having only gotten through Chapter One (the big introductions!), is the rest of it as ambitious as I suspect it is?

Well, look: it must be, or Kevin wouldn’t be working on it this hard. On the P:B Forum, when urged to think of a new thread to start, I fancied myself very clever by bringing up the matter of Colour! in comics…and boy, am I feeling sheepish now, because the boys were already miles ahead of me on that one. I had talked about the colour in Asterix, the gripping blue of a wave, or the green of a meadow…the joyous lunacy of The Big Fight and its Druidic slap-fight polka-dots. But Kevin had more of a STERANKO ROMANCE COMIC in mind here, it seems…(!!!!)…and that’s a kind of colouring we haven’t seen in a good long while. I think Steranko himself got it from Toth, actually? But in the modern field of comics it’s not been seen much for a while, and to return to it is a very welcome thing indeed. So many PINKS! So much YELLOW! For a certain value of just plain exuberance the last thing I saw that seemed to be in this same mood was the (for my money) unjustly-maligned Daytripper by Ba and Moon. And quite plainly, this approach is very carefully chosen…not just the colour but the looseness of the line that confines it, the casualness that wafts you past Michael’s artfully-strewn hints, flowers on the lawn that you step across, drinks at the bar that you’ve not yet ordered…because there are other places where the look is slightly different, because the tempo is different. It’s so easy to forget about that boy, lost thirty-four years ago! By the time Chapter One ends, the pace has ramped up enough that we are carried away from him, even though we are still aware of him all around us as the excuse for everything…as the context of everything. But we are distracted from seeing him, not just by Kendra and her friends but by the big DMMM that inaugurates — twice! — this, our just-slightly-askew adventure into Tropeland.

And, you know what else we are distracted from?

Well, if you look, it’s right there; so go look. This one’s more than it seems, which is just the way I like them. And it’s part of a larger corpus of inquiry and interest, which is the way I would like them if only more of them came that way. And I’m not even the only one who thinks so! But Peterson and Czapiewski are wiser than to think comics are just about ideas, and that really forms the main selling-point here…the thing that’s really keeping me coming back, and the thing that’ll probably keep you coming back as well…

…Which is that it JUST. LOOKS. BEAUTIFUL.

And it’s a real smooth read to boot.

Anything else that’s in there, you don’t really need me to tell you about it, you know?

Because if you’re interested in finding it, you’ll find it.

So…to close it all out…

Larry Niven might’ve made a tidy mini-career out of the fictionalization of SF conventions, but I think I like this twist on it much better…because what’s available to be fictionalized from the con world is something a bit more developed than what once was, and to be honest Larry’s adolescent chest-puffery just made me mad, after a while. Such a confining space, in which there really isn’t the room for anyone to discover anything! Or at least, not anything they weren’t already sure they knew. He always dressed it up very nicely, but it was always still a mannequin: a dummy, just there to hang things on. Heinlein manque; super people in a super world, whose effort was just something they always talked about but never did. I should say — and maybe when I write that Warren Ellis post one day I will say — that it isn’t even the problem that your basic Heinleinian hero is a super person in a super world, but that instead that they’re an ordinary person in a super world…a world where superiority is just that easy to have, that bartenders and taxi drivers and even SF fans all have it, indefeasibly just have it, because the rules of a superworld simply make it inevitable that they should. And in this way even Niven’s conventioneers are just terribly well-defended people, to the point where even their hangovers are cool…and if I sound like I grew to hate that geeky triumphalism of his it’s because I did, I really did, I hated the idea of the Geek as much as I hated the idea of his Triumph, and so thank God none of that is on evidence here. Because there’s something so much more valuable about the fictionalized con culture of today, isn’t there? I think even an old fogey like me must admit that the gaming stuff makes it all different, deeper, more searching…I mean, I’m sure I’m missing a lot more than half of the, ahem, “political” commentary of the thing (by which of course I mean the whole thing, the whole site), but even I can see that things get a bit more teasingly metatextual when you don’t just have an identification-figure in your fiction, but an actual avatar…whose choices you script, so thoroughly (or at least: diligently) that “identification” barely merits thinking about. Does Wotan think about how much he “identifies” with Siegmund?

Does Thor think about how much he “identifies” with lame physician Don Blake?

So it’s much better now, than it was in Larry Niven’s day: this play-acting doesn’t have to mean escaping into a juvenile fantasy, at all…

So to the gamers, so long disdained, I can only say…

Dude!

I tip my hat to you. This is so clearly the next wave, you know? Of pop-culture analysis, I mean. And to think I used to believe games were a more limiting environment for story…well, clearly I have some catching-up to do…

…So I guess I might as well begin at the beginning.

…

LOADING…

I’ve tried this a couple of times now, and Richard especially keeps me on my toes — on top of all his other enviable qualities, he also has refreshingly strong opinions about Lex Luthor! — yet so far I have not quite cracked the nut. I’ve thought up a Lex Luthor who badly needs a Superman whether he’s willing to admit it or not, because (as I said before, saying that I said before) “in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is King, but the two-eyed man is BORED…!“, which is about as near as I think I come to a true Elliot S! Maggin Luthor, a guy who could almost be you, a guy who knows what Johnny Carson said in his monologue last night…and just a couple of days ago I had Comrade Luthor, the hardworking and principled ultratalented total failure, who aims to remake the world as one where “meritocracy” means more than just good looks…who analogically is the darling of the Movement, but who then gets thrown over by the world for bloody stalwart lantern-jawed Superman, a real man with real prospects in the classic bourgeois formulation…

And this was my, hrmm, “social realism” Luthor, the rival of Superman who didn’t need him, didn’t want him and wishes he’d never been born…who sees Superman as having blocked his own opportunities. Both of these Luthors are, I believe, constituent elements of the “real” Luthor…that remarkable fictional individual who (as Richard so acutely pointed out to me) has managed to maintain a thoroughgoing consistency of character over the decades, sometimes in spite of the efforts of his writers…

And one day, I promise you, either I will make him write a post called something like “<Choke!>: Emotion, Empathy, and Sophistication in Superhero Comics”, or I will write it myself…but better for us all if he writes it…

…However neither of my slices of Lex Luthor, as interesting (at least to myself) as I’ve tried to make them, can quite cover for the absence of all the other things that make Luthor “himself”, even though in my opinion the man really could use a little updating. Refreshing? This sounds more hubristic, really, even than saying Superman himself needs rebooting…Superman can fall out of touch with the times, sometimes, but is Luthor really subject to the same clock-creep? As a villain, and thus not our identification figure even if he’s got some attractive texture on him (because who in the world would be crazy enough to take the villain as their identification-figure?), he’s pretty much guaranteed to run like a top, isn’t he?

Well…

Maybe so, but it isn’t like Luthor himself hasn’t done any changing. Remember Luthor the mature man, portly, sedentary, and of a likewise immovable disposition? And then we’ve also had the youthful and sprightly Luthor, the star athlete of super-villains, quick-witted and facile. I tried to get at that one too, in my Comrade Luthor take, with “Lex Luthor: Scientific Adventurer!”, the man who tested how Superman can possibly do the things he does by stealing a march on Lois Lane as far as getting into super-rescuable scrapes goes…all to a hidden purpose…and also stealing a march on Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, whose 70s sobriquet “Mr. Action” I also had Luthor claim first for his own dark purposes. And something about that does appeal to me, in a rebooty kind of way, because aren’t reboots generally exercises in tightening-up the associations that’ve accreted like old cobwebs around such decades-old properties as Superman? Not that these associations just “happened”, we must remember — they were consciously and carefully embroidered on the existing work by many artists, thinking hard about what had gone before — but if every reboot is a consolidation of what’s already there, it means simply drawing firmer lines of cause and effect between already-connected elements, and it pleases me to have drawn on something so trivially everyday as the “getting into scrapes” thing, so to have made of it a tiny continuity. In the heady morning of the day of Superman, Luthor finds worthy things to screw up at in order to test his enemy, and thus makes Lana Lang’s attempts to expose young Clark Kent as Superboy look embarrassingly imitative — not her fault, it’s just that Lex tends to sow bad feelings in the people he’s around! — but when Lois Lane, Investigative Reporter, tries the same thing on it is like she’s the real version of what Lex only pretended to be…and likewise Jimmy, but then Superman gives him that signal-watch just for the purpose, doesn’t he? The Daily Planet staff is clearly a tonic for Clark Kent, nobody lying or dissembling…in the version I outlined, Smallville starts to look a bit like Lumberton and Twin Peaks: there’s always something sneaky going on! And, as I said, it’s kind of a trivial thing, but that’s why I like it…in the TV show Smallville, too, there is always some deceitful tomfuckery going on in that damned town! As in small towns everywhere, but big bright and clean Metropolis is too fast-paced and important for mere petty deceit to reign, and also I flatter myself that “Lex Luthor: Scientific Adventurer!” may recall the falsely-reformed Luthor of an older and greater day…

But anyway: many Luthors, from the fat old spider to the lithe prison boxing champ, but what interests me most about those different Luthors is how they were seen by their writers and artists and readers, in the days they were created. Not too long ago I mentioned that if you look at the rise of the American television sitcom, and if you squint, you can see that these are stories by, for, and about the scant survivors of a terrible war…half the men of America were killed, right?…but I confess again that throughout most of my life, I have only thought of them as things that help to explain who I am, not things that explain the people of the times they were made in, who actually made them, and watched them. And, it’s pretty dumb, but didn’t the generation before me make the same mistake, in thinking that to understand them you had to understand Howdy-Doody? All in neglect of understanding Howdy-Doody’s makers, and what their motivations were. So, I grew up in an age where references to the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch gradually became de rigeur in social settings, largely because they didn’t start out that way…were not seen as connecting influences of any deep social worth by the Establishment, maaan, until my peers and I made them so…

Uhh, in youthful frenzy, and as it turns out that’s a frenzy that only youth can have, because holy crap I must tell you that as you get old then so does that remember-when connection stuff…! Because let’s face it, you can only establish that other people also remember Danny selling Keith’s pickle so many times, before you start insisting there must be more to it all, that if we’re going to exalt this stuff then we ought to be able to reason on it a little better, that there must somehow be something to say besides just “yes, I remember that too”…

(makes note on calendar: “today explained for the benefit of exactly no one why I like writing about comics on the Internet…”)

But, lost in all that frenzy were some peculiar facts, such as: do you know that for decades I thought American TV sitcom families described normativity? WOW, yes, I know…! Lucy and Ricky didn’t have a child ’til they were in their mid-thirties (with Lucy being the older spouse), Shirley Partridge was a widowed mother of like seven kids or something, the Brady Bunch is a frankly insane set-up that should shake off dark prequel plots like a terrier shakes off water, and I do have to tell you that it isn’t even just the “family” stuff, but the workplace comedies reflect it all too. Yes, the workplace comedies with all their painfully-single people…and what do you want to bet that Mary Richards didn’t come to Minneapolis from a smaller town?

Looks a bit different when you think of it that way, doesn’t it?

And don’t even get me started on Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith…or, actually, do, but just not right now…because weren’t we talking about Lex Luthor?

Oh, indeed we were! Because all villains look like something, you know…they look like the frights of their times, and more importantly they look like the frightful people of their times! Lex Luthor, long in advance of John Byrne’s 1980s businessman-reboot, looks fat and soft and arrogant as only a true plutocrat can, his meritocratic pretensions revealed as deliberately self-serving lies…and, sure, he doesn’t own factories yet, but in my opinion it’s kind of the point that he doesn’t, because when Superman is cleaning up a world of corrupt mine-owners and slumlords — criminals, with a veneer of repectability — then doesn’t Luthor make sense as the same sort of criminal only stripped of that veneer? From jail, Luthor sends out implacable waves of hate at Superman…he does not choose to be rehabilitated, and he will get out, and we will keep doing this dance over and over again, because Luthor doesn’t even care if he goes to jail…! But he is just hell-bent on his bad behaviour, and Superman can throw him in jail but he can’t make him stop, and he can’t polish him off either.

Because the system is not prepared to pay the cost it would take, to cease encouraging criminality?

We see the same thing in the NHL these days, with all the talk of the problem of head injuries. But if they were prepared to pay the cost of getting rid of the problem, then there wouldn’t be any talk…

However…

Maybe that’s a subject for another time. Anyway! Some of the stuff I am not getting about Lex Luthor in my re-renditions of him is, I know, the stuff which is some of my very favourite stuff about Luthor, which is the stuff that is extremely time-bound. <choke!> In older Superman comics Luthor’s thought-processes are interesting, even though they’re always about the same thing, because they sound a bit strange today, weirdly simple and dated and insufficiently lugubrious…where are his ruminations on mortality? Where is his neurosis? Where, his self-reflecting inner commentary? Where is his big confessional moment, for heaven’s sake? Well, but he’s not stamped out of the villainous mould of today, so none of those things are there. None of the expected beats of extravagant introspection that modern writers use as lure to hook the readership’s, or audience’s in the case of movies, sympathy. I’m not saying it’s a crutch, you understand, this business of the extravagantly introspective beats…but it’s a style of our times: motivation, motivation, it must be all the time motivation, and so “simple” just won’t do, because you get to the end of it too quickly. But if you were a reader of the 40s or 50s Superman, you wouldn’t need it all introspected for you, because Luthor looked like a particular sort of bad guy, back then: the sort of guy you used to see sometimes, who is just a very, very hard case. Tough, dogged, and thoroughly unsympathetic! And for the most part unconcerned with the appearances of virtue, because always with his mind on the calculation of what he wants, and simply how to get it. Mind you, I really like the physical-culture Luthor too: the self-improvement guy! The dick at the health club who always wants to beat you at racquetball! The showboater, whose every microgesture is a sophisticated put-down of all those not as superb as he, whose pretensions he mocks by pretending them better. And the cool non-perspiring Luthor in a businessman’s suit, well, he may not be to my taste…but I can see the appeal? As well as the continuity he partakes in with those other Luthors, though I would suggest to John Byrne that the corpulent dude in the charcoal pinstripes, the sweaty super-glutton who seems always on the verge of a temper-tantrum, well that might just be gilding the lily a bit…

Or whatever the opposite of lily-gilding might be, I guess, but I suppose it’s fine too? Hmm, though it’s interesting to roll around just what implications there may be, in changing an out-of-shape scientific genius to an out-of-shape corporate raider…because, you know, what then the import of Superman’s physical excellence, in contrast? I guess that’s why I like the trim and athletic Luthor, myself: his commentary on Superman’s physical excellence is like the commentary Bugs Bunny makes on Elmer Fudd, with the only discrepancy being that Elmer never beats Bugs, but Luthor never wins against Superman…and anyway he isn’t really that insouciant and mercurial guy, and actually maybe that’s why it doesn’t happen.

Really, if you think about it Lex is more like Elmer…!

But maybe that’s one for another time too. Anywhere, where was I? Oh yes:

The stuff I can never manage to get into my thinking about How To Do Luthor. Well, let me make another stab at it today, anyway, even if I can’t shoehorn in that tough nut of the Forties…at least, not directly as what he was…

(ahem)

So here, perhaps, is the deal with the “real” Lex Luthor, branching out from what I said in the comments in that last Superman post. That in his Superboy origin, Lex is not jealous of Superboy, not one bit! But he’s just really happy to have a friend…and really crushed when he discovers that Superboy actually wasn’t his friend, but was secretly always jealous of him! Now, of course Luthor is wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sour him, and most importantly it doesn’t mean that he really was jealous of Superboy, because he totally wasn’t! Perhaps alone out of all the people Superboy ever met, young Lex was absolutely absent of awe where Superboy was concerned, because Lex could do incredible things too. Especially when someone believed in him? Over in Batman, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face not because of an encounter with fantasy but because of an encounter with reality…and goes just as wrong as Lex does, and for the same reason: not because he’s inherently evil, but because he isn’t inherently evil. And over in perhaps my favourite re-envisioning of Lex Luthor at Tom Strong’s place, Paul Saveen proves in “Crisis In Infinite Hearts” that he doesn’t have to go bad either, being given just one friend. Though, notably, when he cracks he cracks ugly, just as Luthor did, and you really never can tell about people, can you…?

What they will do.

Though his reasons, Luthor’s always got. They’re perfectly fine reasons, they just happen to be based in egotism and they just happen to be wrong…and Lex turns out to be not that nice a person when push comes to shove, and the one thing about all versions of Lex Luthor is that there never is a time when push doesn’t come to shove. For some reason, he just has to have it that way; and you’re not smart enough, even if you’re Superman, to keep him from taking it all to that level. Not smart enough, even if you’re Superman, to chill the guy out. Because by the time you get there, even if Luthor’s still to all appearances a nice young man with a full head of hair, he’s already outgrown any authority figures in his life who might’ve been able to balance the scales of injustice for him, on his behalf! I think I mentioned something recently about Marvel’s great villain, Dr. Doom, always insisting on living in the past, or at least in a stuck present: a present that can never get any better because he won’t be there in it. But Luthor’s exactly the opposite, and refuses to spend any time in the past…he won’t change, simply because the clock doesn’t go backward: he’s got nowhere to go but on. A real tough nut? In All-Star Superman, Clark Kent practically hollers at Lex while he’s in prison, “for Christ’s sake Lex, I’m tired of doing this dance with you!” But Luthor barely notices. Because Luthor never looks back. His thoughts are always interesting, but they’re always about the same thing: always stuck on the bubble of the eternal present, never looking anywhere but to what he wants…so the one thing he never sees coming, is anything he didn’t already know he wanted, that it turns out he actually does.

So!

Therefore!

My Lex Luthor, from the story of Black Hole Superman, who has a Smallville origin as my last go-round at this lacked one…and it’s a complicating thing, the Smallville origin! Because you have to start with Good Lex, the helpful young redheaded boy. In an origin without Smallville, Luthor simply notices Superman one day along with everybody else, but in a Smallville origin without Kryptonite it isn’t clear how he and Superboy become friends…so what the hell, let’s go with Lex Luthor, Scientific Adventurer, after all! And it isn’t a lie, at first; and Lex is not jealous of Superboy, so that’s no problem either. But if Superboy can do something for Lex (like saving him on an occasion when he overreaches himself), then there will always be something Lex can do for him, and in this case that means becoming his confidante. What does Black Hole Superboy know of his origins? We won’t have any magic green crystal here; the rocket ship arrived, and the baby came out of it, but there’s very little else in the way of information that young Clark Kent gets. Possibly the Navigator of the rocketship carried a little artificially-intelligent Jor-El-in-replica, who was able to tell Jonathan and Martha a thing or two about his son — or maybe not! — but either way, if you want to get all kings-in-disguise about it then the one thing the foundling boy never gets to know until later, is where he came from and what his inheritance is. So Young Lex actually makes quite a good friend for Superboy, because only a genius like himself could hope to reason out anything about Superboy’s origins, simply starting from what Superboy can do.

But, that’s before he knows Superboy is a liar, right? And it is indeed an odd coincidence, that Kal-El should happen to land right in the town where the only universal genius on a par with his late father lives…just as odd, really, as being landed in the outskirts of the Orion Spur, just one step short of being lost forever in the interstitial gulf that lies before the Perseid Arm. If you look at closely, it just seems like an awful lot to ask, for all that to be happenstance! Not that anyone knows about it yet, but just give Lex time and he’ll get there…and when he gets there, will it not give him just that much more justification, for doubting his former friend’s honesty? Lex begins by toying with the idea that Superboy is some kind of evolutionary fluke, then he considers the possibility that Superboy may be the product of some kind of genetic engineering…but as more and more time goes by, all of that seems less and less likely, and eventually he reveals his conclusion, that his friend must be some sort of alien life from elsewhere in the cosmos, fallen to Earth like a star. This sits very poorly with Young Clark, as you can imagine, and the poor fellow flies off somewhere to grapple with his feelings…so in the meantime, Lex feels like he’s got to pick up the slack for his disturbed friend, therefore Mr. Action springs into just that! And what a job he does, too: it’s really impressive.

Meanwhile Superboy is starting to feel a bit guilty about neglecting his responsibilities — has he been yelling at Ma and Pa, has he been talking to Legion members during this, his first crisis of faith? Lex has done a great job, but Lex is only…<choke!>…human…

…And maybe he’s been leaning on him a little too hard, so he sends him a message. With super-ventriloquism? The details don’t really matter all that much…Lex is on a big case, and can’t be reached by ordinary means, but Superboy reaches him indirectly, places a message where he can find it, and tells him he’ll be back on the job tomorrow, apologies apologies…I dunno, maybe he’s in space, and that’s why he’s setting a time for when he’ll be back? Anyway, Lex counts on it; these new villains he’s chasing, they’re really tough to catch, and he’s about at his wit’s end. They have some really weird technology, that he doesn’t understand, and though he’s been a real thorn in their side he just can’t seem to get to the centre of their operations. He’s been sneaky, he’s been undercover, but it’s all just taking too long, and after all he is only human! Superboy, with his weird powers, could do what Lex can’t, and penetrate to the heart of the conspiracy…that is, if he knew about it what Lex knows, which he doesn’t. However…

…Superboy, his pal, is coming back tomorrow. Lex knows the exact time of his arrival, even. And wouldn’t it be something, to have a little “glad you’re back” present all giftwrapped for him? So Lex allows himself to be captured by the conspiracy, because he’s got a secret weapon they don’t know about…and just as they’re lining him up for the big kiss-off, he does whatever crafty thing he’s thought of to do in order to let Superboy know exactly where he is…

But nothing happens.

Lex Luthor is in the tiger’s den, he’s allowed himself to be stripped of all his gizmos in an all-or-nothing gambit, and it’s worked…but where’s his secret weapon? He’s out there without a net, deliberately without a net, he’s about to take the real plunge and he’s relying on Superboy to catch him, and Superboy is nowhere to be found…!

…And meanwhile out in space (or wherever, but probably space), Superboy is trapped, unable to make it home to save Lex. Maybe he even hears him calling? But whether it’s Zod or it’s Mxyzptlk, or it’s naturally-occurring Kryptonite, or it’s Brainiac or it’s Terra-Man or it’s some other damn thing…or maybe it’s that he has to go to the future with the Legion!…he’s not able to be where he said he would be, when he said he would be, and so Lex realizes that he’s totally on his own, and only human after all. Naturally he thinks fast and gets out of it by some lucky chance, but that’s the first moment when push comes to shove, for him, and he’s not going to forget it. Superboy, no doubt jealous that Lex was about to bring in a mutual crimefighting victory for them that neither one could have accomplished alone, sabotaged him by giving him false information…no doubt he was jealous at just how well Mr. Action was making out, even without superpowers…

(Say, Lex could’ve been the one to name those powers, couldn’t he? “Super” powers, powers that don’t seem to work in accordance with the limitations of physical law…and maybe the name “Superboy” could’ve been a riff on that coinage?)

…And so that’s it for Lex and Superboy, even if Superboy doesn’t know it yet, and even if he feels bad about it and has a good excuse that he can talk about…which, you know, if it’s the future or something then he probably can’t talk about it, can he? But even if he could, it wouldn’t make any difference. Through relying on Superboy, Lex came this close to being killed, and was lucky to get away just being permanently balded…Lex may now have an advanced form of whatever that real disease is that causes your cilia to lie flat, only in addition all the hair on the outside of his body is just gone…but seriously, that disease is serious business, it affects your protection from environmental contaminants, it affects your breathing, it affects your immune system…people do manage to live with it, but it’s dicey stuff, and let’s just say it’s a good thing Lex is a genius? It’s a good thing he’s a genius, because otherwise from this condition he could die anyway, despite having cleverly escaped the clutches, and set back the plans, of…

Oh, go on. Take a guess.

Anyway it is not just that he’s bald, all right? Heck, he might’ve gone prematurely bald anyway, for all he knows, and anyway what kind of a crazily petty person would he be, if he swore eternal vengeance on somebody just because they caused him to go bald?

(Well…the petty one that’s in the shaving mirror, maybe?)

But the point is, even though he got away from the dangerous choke-point of his young life, he didn’t get away unscarred, he didn’t get away scot free, but he got TAGGED…and Superboy’s probably laughing about it right now, that inhuman bastard, but it’s no joke! Why if he hadn’t invented a treatment for that follicle condition (which of course he is not in much of a mood to share at the moment!), his life expectancy would be seriously in doubt, and anyway he’ll still have to live with the fact of the condition his whole life, because you know what? You know what? Some of us aren’t fucking invulnerable, Superboy, and oh boy what a laugh riot it must seem to you, you stinking alien, and what was Lex thinking ever believing they could be friends…

…When Superboy probably doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.

But though Lex would totally blow his cool at Superboy if Superboy was around, since he’s not around then Lex thinks twice, and decides to keep his change of heart under his hat for a while, while he tests Superboy not in a friendly helpful way, but more in earnest. Before, you see, he was just looking for an explanation; now, he’s looking for weakness. And for Lex Luthor — any Lex Luthor! — vindictive motivation is what really turns on the old I.Q. Motivation, motivation, that’s always been Lex’s problem, you know? Because in the country of the blind, and so on…I mean they say he could’ve cured cancer, and he could’ve, but when your mind is always going everywhere at a million miles an hour then focus becomes a real problem. Befriending Superboy helped to clarify Lex’s genius wonderfully, and now that he’s un-befriended him it’s clarified it even more. And, look, the truth is that Lex is not 100% wrong even though he’s 100% in the wrong, because Superboy really never was honest with him. He didn’t tell him he was really Clark Kent, for example. And, he didn’t tell him why he couldn’t make it in time to save him, when Lex laid it all on the line for real in (mostly) the name of do-gooding and altruism. In fact Superboy’s life in Smallville is a rather interesting sort of growing-up story, right? He tells Pete Ross who he really is. He lies to his best friend Luthor every single day about who he is. He confides in Luthor about the nature of his abilities, and how they freak him out. He loves Lana, but he won’t make a move, so he ends up making her look like an idiot. Oh, Lana! Lex really does hide his motives by faking some “Mr. Action” scenarios in order to more thoroughly examine the Kryptonian power-set, and Superboy never suspects…but Lana is made to look like a fool because of it anyway. Meanwhile she’s the only one who ever puts two and two together and comes up with “Clark Kent is Superboy”, even freakin’ best-friend universal genius Lex Luthor never does that…and Pete Ross just sort of finds out one day, but Lana is the only one to suspect the existence of such a thing as the “secret identity”, and she’s dead on the target, and she can never prove it because Clark Kent is a coward when it comes to women, yet she never gives up on her reasoned conviction. You think she doesn’t know that if Clark were Superboy, then he could use his powers to make it look like he wasn’t? Talk about your scientific adventurers, Lana is all over that action…!

And in the end, Superboy builds Lex Luthor a lab, where Lex invents Kryptonite and tests it on his secretly-former friend…but Lana saves him, because she knows Clark is really Superboy, so when he goes missing she goes looking for him, that’s all. And she finds him, and he’s in trouble, and so does she really need any more proof than that? Lex’s grand plan of revenge is foiled, just after he’s revealed how much he HATES Superboy for what Superboy did to him, and so all the cats are out of the bag, except of course that Lex still doesn’t suspect that a “secret identity” is a thing…and Superboy gets away, but he’s weakened, so Lex seizes the opportunity to make his own escape, and now he knows about the 5D connection for sure, and it’s only a matter of time until he starts to reason out the rest of the story. Not the whole of the rest of story, mind, but that there is a “rest of the story”…

He’ll be there soon.

No one knows what Superman can do, like Lex Luthor does!

No one understands him more, and no one understands him less!

And that’s the whole sad story of it, and thus concludes our little play. And if we shadows have offended…!

…

Oh yeah, and one more thing. Just a thought, really.

About that time-travel business…

Suppose for a moment that the Legion can’t easily visit the present day (whichever present day we happen to be talking about) in a physical form. They can do audiovisual projection all right, but actual physical manifestation…that’s hard. Even to bring someone from the present to the future, is easier than going from the future to the present! And perhaps on certain occasions it is harder still. Brainiac-5′s intellect is certainly equal to the task of solving time-travel — he is the Third Universal Genius, after all! — but working the time-bubbles, that’s another story. Intellect is not in charge of that; that’s a practical matter, not an abstract one.

Physical laws still do apply, you know! Why if Brainy’s work wasn’t within the strictures of physical law, then he would really be a scientist at all, would he? But some sort of magician, instead…

But anyway. You will notice I never did get to the “tough nut” Luthor, but that’s because he’s a lot harder to get to these days, than he once was. However, to the Luthor who has to do with labour relations I think I may actually have gotten. Luthor is the disillusioned one here, you see, in the story of Superman as Marxist mirror…he believed more in the Movement than the Movement believed in him, or so he thinks. Absolutely Comrade Luthor, the revolutionary rival of Superman! But it isn’t that Superman pushed him out…

But rather, it’s that Superman let him down. Which, if you think about it, he sort of did…

Because he’s the only person, that Superman never saved.

Just a quick note to let you all know that a lot of the links around here have been rendered inactive, as my old A Trout In The Milk blog back at Blogspot has been DELETED.

Fortunately, I backed it all up a few months ago on another WordPress blog made specially for the purpose, so in a little while I’ll be able to replace most of the links, and over time I hope to get to all of them…but I don’t quite know how long “over time” will be.  It could be a while.

You may be curious to know how this happened.  Well, my Gmail account got hacked, you see…and since I don’t use Gmail AT ALL anymore (I think it may have something to do with their incessant demands for my mobile phone number?), I figured the quickest solution (if also the dirtiest) was just to nuke the account from orbit.  Really, I didn’t want it anymore, and had been thinking what a silly thing it was to keep around.  The spamhack just gave me a reason to finally do something about it.

But, here’s the interesting thing.  I only saw one “Delete Account” button when I went to get this dirty work done — maybe someone could tell me if there was another one that I missed? — and that button was not for deleting my Gmail account, it was for deleting my GOOGLE account, which as you may know since the Grand Integration are considered to be one and the same.  You can’t even get a “Gmail account” now, right?  Gmail is bundled with the Total Google Package — I want to say, the Total Google Institution — and of course what’s your global Google username?

It’s your Gmail account’s name.

And what’s your global Google password?

Obviously, it’s the same as your Gmail account’s password.

So this was built out from the centre of the registered user base, right?  Very logically and sensibly, and I confess I never really thought about it ’til now, at least past thinking “oh, what a pain in the ass this new Google ID makes it to comment on Blogger!”  But as it turns out…

As it turns out, two years or so of near-daily writing was already held hostage to Google’s webmail — and all its other various services — without me knowing about it.  They will tell you it’s all voluntary, and I guess it is…

But what does “voluntary” really mean, when such penalties obtain for making the wrong choice?

As a lifelong Non-Optimal User, it’s a question I’ve had occasion to ask myself many times.  But, I’ll be going into that in a bit more detail VERY SOON, so I won’t clutter up this brief note more than I must.  But I thought maybe I should tell you all, because how else would you know:

Yes, my old blog is GONE!  Gone for good.

So some of the links around here are going to be dead ends for a while.

And also…

If I were you, I would look into keeping a few extra baskets around, for egg-holding, besides just the Google one.  We speak of Yahoo! a bit derisively, sometimes, these days…but this afternoon I was transported by a mighty surge of relief, to realize that Flickr! is actually a Yahoo service, and not a Google one.

And such surges of relief are things you can’t really put a price on.

So:  sorry about the self-inflicted linkrot!

I promise I’ll get on it as soon as I may.

Hi.

I have started to get back into reading your blog.  I feel just the tiniest bit of shame for not having read it these last couple of years?  Evidence of time:  the last I remember reading your blog was during your AMAZINGLY EXCELLENT “Walking With Superman” series, and so how long ago is THAT?!

I’m just about to write a post that HEAVILY references your brilliant “Why I Hate The X-Gene” (which I can’t find right now, but folks:  Tom is one of premier blenders of science and superheroes), and it’s made me think of you, and it’s made me think of me, and it’s made me think about how small I used to think comics blogland used to be, but now it’s bigger, but now I read less and fewer and smaller, so maybe it’s not the blogs, but it’s me who’s gotten small?

(Actually I suspect Twitter has had a lot to do with it…)

Anyway, lacking your number, and knowing you as one of our Premier Superman Men, and overall wanting to just kind of say “hey”…

…Well, I just wrote a sort of ridiculous Superman thing, in the post before this.  It seems absolutely MAD to me now, from about twenty minutes ago, and disgracefully all of a sudden! that I did not think to tell you I was doing such a thing.  Because it’s physics and Superman with a little Bob Haney steak sauce on it, seared swiftly in a pan and then thrown on the grill to…uh…

…End up a bit too well-done?

Anyway:  TOM FOSS, an old favourite blogger of mine I have neglected shamefully in recent times.  We do this thing because it’s fun;  it isn’t like we get paid to do it, right?  And we certainly don’t do it for the public respect it brings us.  Shit, now that I think of it, why the hell do we do it?

My God, this is where cultural materialism breaks down, I think!  Because seriously, is there a functionalist explanation for people talking about Superman on the Internet?

…

…

HMM…

Anyway:  hi, Tom.  Long time no see.

I’ll be sure to see more of you soon!

(Though I guess there is no particular reason why comics should move with the times…)

And so this is my Superman reboot, with thanks to beta readers Richard and Nate! And we’re going to get rid of a bunch of stuff. The red sun? Gone, for reasons already covered at some length…

Krypto the Superdog? GONE!

Kryptonite, the broken pieces of the crust of Superman’s home planet?

VANISHED! Though with an explanation…

And X-ray vision and super-hearing and even flying, all gone too, disappeared without trace. Don’t even mourn their passing! Just consider them to have been raptured up into that big fictional multiverse in the sky, along with super-cats and super-horses and even Mon-El of the Legion of Super-Heroes…which, maybe it exists somewhere, in some Superman’s milieu, but it doesn’t exist here. Alternate universes? Sure.

But a big fat ol’ Multiverse?

As you will see, in this case it turns out we can either have a Multiverse or a Superman, but we can’t have both.

But, we do get Superbaby out of it as a compensation.

So… shall we begin?

*

Once upon a time, long long ago when the Mathusians were off in some other galaxy still learning how to knap flint, there was a fabulous star-spanning empire that spread throughout the Milky Way. This was actually not too long after the Milky Way had formed, when galactic centres were calmer places, and thus the first sites of life. In most of today’s galactic centres, you understand, life is not possible: the supermassive black holes of active galactic nuclei appear to be highly-correlated with the appearance of life, but just let those giant entropic engines run for a few billion years and their waste products scorch all the space around them into an uninhabitable desert. The theory is that this correlation has to do with metallicity, by the way, in the fortunate accumulation of that dust that fled the hard light of the very early quasars: very difficult to fertilize a galaxy without that intergalactic pollen, but it also gives you black hole bestiaries, all the cages in the zoo so closely jammed together that they can’t help consolidating themselves into just one big cage, over time. Not that you will always find no life in a galaxy without an active nucleus, but it’s just far more rare…”dark” pinwheels spin more slowly in this sense than bright ones, which is why there aren’t many different Guardians of the Universe dwelling on odd central planets, but only the ones we know of: the longshots that came off, the incredibly ancient ones who got unimaginably lucky, way back at the dawn of time…

…Or rather: the early morning of time, since development like theirs was slow, in their old dim elliptical, low and slow like they say about barbeque on the Food Network. But as it happens, our beloved Milky Way did host a true Dawn Culture, a bright fast regime that knit the whole place together and helped younger cultures to advance themselves. And maybe it was not all exactly what we’d call “philanthropic”, but at least the Dawn Culture was not rapacious…well, actually that would’ve been quite difficult for them, you see, because at that time there was only one world that really was a world, and it was their own. Only one rich world, in a galaxy as yet still very metal-poor, and thus resource-poor. And star travel, even for them with their wonderful “gravitic” drives that shrunk and expanded the space around their ships, takes a lot of energy. So if you were only interested in being colonialists then the costs of Empire wouldn’t be balanced for you in the early universe, and you wouldn’t do it; but they did it anyway, so we can only assume they did it for other reasons. But it was all so long ago that it’s tough to speculate on their motives — even the Guardians barely remember the Dawn Culture, mainly as rumours and legends, and the galaxy was so different then. In fact the only way we have of actually knowing the Dawn Culture existed is in the common theoretical framework that supports most everyone’s stardrive technology…secrets handed down, often lost, sometimes rediscovered, very rarely independently invented, over eons of time. Well, and a few extremely advanced civilizations use wormholes, stargates, fancy stuff that verges on or doubles as full-bore time-travel technology…which is very dangerous…but mostly where you find somebody piloting a ship from planet to planet, they’re using the Dawn Culture’s special magic even if they don’t know it, or don’t remember it…

And they don’t remember it, because long ago — long, long ago! — the Dawn Culture disappeared. Hid themselves, as far as the other people in the galaxy knew…which explains why every race that remembers them, calls them pretty much the same thing:

The Hidden.

So on Earth, if we remembered them, their semi-mythical home planet would probably be known as “Krypton”, to us…if we remembered them, which we don’t. Because we’re just too darn young. But oh, how the early peoples of the Milky Way searched and searched for a trace of their Kryptonian benefactors, after their disappearance! But they never could find them, and they never will…

And here’s why. Out at the fringes of the Kryptonian Empire, their ambassadors began to notice that the homeworld was moving, in every one of their subjective frames, slower and slower. And why this was happening was not exactly tough to figure out: the big shadow of Sagittarius A, the Milky Way’s central black hole, was gradually drawing Krypton into its umbra. Soon, very soon, it would slip over the event horizon and be lost forever…for one instant finally matching the speed of light, the gamma factor hitting unity just as the universe’s door bangs it in the ass and it’s gone. So the overwhelming majority of Kryptonians chose to return home — to the only world that was a world! — rather than tragically out-age and out-live all their loved ones in their relativistic slowdown. And only a few recalcitrant ones, rebels and outcasts, chose to stay where they were and survive, usually under false names and dark clouds of secrecy. Thus all the ships went home, and the galaxy went very quiet almost overnight, and in time Krypton did indeed slip silently out of the main parlour of the universe.

Billions and billions of years ago.

Except.

Inside a black hole, time’s not the same thing as it is on the outside. So for the Kryptonians who fell in, it was — or rather, is — not billions and billions of years ago, that this all happened, but more like “just a little while ago”.

Here’s where it gets speculative. Inside the black hole, “time” just means the direction of space that points inward to the singularity, and “gravitic” drives DON’T WORK…because inside a black hole, spacetime isn’t shrinkable or expandable, it just IS. But that isn’t all that’s going on, with that internal space; because there’s another component of motion inside the event horizon besides just “in” and “out”, which reveals the previous conception of “spacetime” as being slightly incomplete! Stars that spiralled in, logically (well, logically if you’re Bob Haney) continue to spiral down, and though “time” is only something they experience on the one vector of motion, on the other they experience something somewhat like time, without it actually being time. Hey, outside the black hole you would be very hard-pressed to experience this “other vector” stuff, since outside the black hole it is actually aligned with time! But once inside, it becomes apparent that there is a fifth dimension that’s been there all along, lurking underneath time. Inside the black hole, things are very different in a lot of ways, but you don’t necessarily just die instantly when you pass into one’s interior; a black hole as big as Sagittarius A is quite mild when it comes to tidal effects, and you wouldn’t automatically know immediately when you had crossed its invisible boundary, especially if the strange conditions inside made it so you were tidally-locked forever behind your star, with its ameliorating bulk forever between you and the singularity’s siren, though still very far-off, gravitic call…

Though you’d soon start seeing some very strange stuff, for sure! Inside a black hole, cosmological history goes in reverse: all the forces and dimensions are neatly frozen-out and separated, then stepwise they’re recombined at higher and higher energies as you fall inwards. First, light goes: electromagnetism is smashed into the weak force, fused under pressure to become something else, and whatever photons are “free” simply fall up to the border of the event horizon, there to circle endlessly, timelessly, spacelessly…always just not quite fast enough to escape into the outer universe. So light — light qua light, if you know what I mean — leaves you, is peeled away to find its own level, as the electromagnetic processes it used to mediate become other processes, that electromagnetism wots not of. Matter isn’t the same; and energy takes different paths from A to B, along different highways…lost highways, overgrown these 13 or 14 billion years now. Further down, as energies mount, there is a “stratospheric” deck of W bosons, that are similarly peeled away to seek their own level as electroweak force fuses to strong force. And below that, presumably a “tropospheric” deck of gluons, and down at the very bottom, at the Omega Point itself, gravity joins them in their widening wading pool just in time for the whole mess to simply pop out of the universe completely, back into the unknown topological register of pre-Big Bang Space…whatever that is.

Except obviously there’s a fifth force too, though what it is we won’t know until Jor-El figures it out. Down in the black hole, along the “other vector”, experience continues to accumulate, and the power of life gets concentrated and reconcentrated, denser and denser living in every measurable inch of “time”. So the Kryptonians are pleased to discover that, far from dying, they’re becoming a bit, well, “super”! And it seems as though this will just continue and continue on down to Omega, where they will become…er, “protonauts”? Popping out of reality into whatever came before reality? Just as their “superness” reaches an ultimate. So everything’s cool, and God’s got this, so in the meantime why not have some fun: there are no rules down here, and the energy-density of everything is mounting all the time…hey, why not become super-criminals and petty dictators? In this fascinating, ever-more-lively-and-tumultuous, exciting environment of possibility. How about a little war, for that matter, eh? Just harmless fun to the superpeople, right?

But Jor-El doesn’t think so, and he’s not alone. Employing his own concentration and reconcentration of the powers of life — his special thing is scientific genius, by the way — he repurposes the old stardrives in such a way that they can liberate light from a Kryptonian body, or rather turn the material of a Kryptonian body into a mess of massless particles (“Q Rays”, maybe?) that behave in a way very like light, whereupon they all peel off and seek their own level in the eternal “phantom zone”: the ring of light that orbits Sagittarius A just inside the Schwarzchild radius. Poof! No more war criminals! And now we can all get back to business…right?

Well…

Jor-El isn’t a genius for nothing, you know, and he knows that the whole universe runs as it does because the principle of conservation is the highest law of the land. Even inside a black hole, it has to be observed! So nothing is destroyed, but only changed; and nothing is changed, except it leaves some product behind it that balances the books of mass and energy. The Kryptonian felons who get turned into “liberated light” leave something behind them, for instance: gravity showers, perhaps in the form of Higgs bosons, that make a flat plain behave gravitationally more like a mountain range. Everything inside the black hole can’t get out, not as information and not as anything else either: from the outside, a black hole reveals nothing whatsoever about what may pass inside it, only getting bigger the more external stuff it swallows. So everything that happens inside just stays inside, in order that the mass and energy budget of the universe entire may balance. That’s why there’s no way to escape the black hole, you see: because it can’t shrink, no matter how your fancy stardrive used to work on the outside of it. At best, it can not grow for a millisecond or two…but conservation, the parent of Time, gives you nothing more than that. So the Phantom Zone Projector, that magical device (Higgs field manipulator?) that only works inside a black hole, is maybe quite a risky piece of gear to have used so much…Q-Ray sprites leaving the surface of Krypton leave a particle cascade behind them, that changes their planet. And perhaps they’ve already used it too much: when Zod was finally dispatched, last of the super-warlords, strange tremors shook the capitol…well, tremors are always shaking the capitol, as energy reconcentrates itself within inanimate objects too, but this one was different. And Jor-El is worried. Krypton’s survival may teeter on a knife’s edge, the protestations of the “newly”-formed Science Council (“but Jor-El, as time goes on we are not using the Projector as much, so these are probably just aftershocks, that we’ve probably already seen the worst of!”) notwithstanding…

…And especially they are notwithstanding because of the thing Jor-El knows that no one else wants to hear: that Krypton is not going to make it down to Omega anyway, but is doomed to break up and smear out and fizz off into nothingness, whereupon the Kryptonians will all finally die the real death, long before they are transported into the realm of the protonauts. It’s the difference between stars and planets, you see: stars aren’t made of much that’s different, and what is different in them is constantly being recirculated, the different energy-reconcentrating profiles of the different elements smoothed by solar convection. But planets are different, never mind that they’re held together by the same force of gravity that will apply all the way to the bottom: Rao may soften the singularity’s tide, but it can’t do anything about the other vector, that gradually makes uranium into super-uranium, that makes iron into super-iron…that eventually will create super-elements capable of causing their own disassociation even over the objections of the force of gravity. One day, all of this will reach escape velocity! Including the stuff of your own wonderful body, which after all has noplace to put its reconcentrating energy either…!

But Jor-El is still a bit worried, that the past use of the Projector has brought escape velocity even closer. Perhaps it is just around the corner: gravity showers causing weird differentials to mount up in unseen and untrackable places. Until just a nudge here or there, in the right location, might be all it takes?

Might be all it takes, for Krypton to be doomed sooner than later.

However…

However…

Here’s what will happen at the end of the universe: long after heat-death has claimed everything with absolute thoroughness, there will be a brief reintroduction of order as the black holes all finally and explosively pop, once their evaporation via Hawking radiation has whittled them down in size so much that they can’t remain stable. Smaller ones first, then bigger ones later, and supermassive ones last, but in that epoch they will all go, and the information long stored on their surfaces will come free as a sort of “death bond” into spacetime. The prisoners of the Phantom Zone will be freed at this instant, too, though there will be nothing for them to do, and no mischief they can make…well, in fact they will be loosed as anti-Q Rays according to Jor-El’s calculations, travelling backwards in time on a very long loop through the black hole’s increasingly-powerful gravitational field, and finally nudged back inside it by the gravitic weight of time-reversed Hawking radiation at the exact moment their Q-Ray sprite counterparts were sent up from Krypton’s surface, to meet and annihilate, and keep the matter/energy budget of the universe intact. That’s what’s going to happen: in negative time, their masses will then descend — have already descended, if you look at it the right way — back to Krypton’s surface, as the meeting of Q-Ray and anti-Q Ray produces mass in the same way that the meeting of electron and positron produces energy. And this is all enabled only by the fact…as Jor-El suddenly sees from his amazingly privileged position as an experimenter…

…That the universe is fundamentally time-asymmetric. And the only reason it doesn’t look time-asymmetric, is that the residual fractions of energy that would indicate its asymmetric nature are being bled off into the fifth dimension.

But two can play that game, if one of them is dead, and so Jor-El has — Rao help him — an idea. As long as conservation isn’t violated, then part of Krypton can live on. One last use of the Phantom Zone Projector — he thinks it may be enough to finally cause Krypton’s ultimate disassociation — simultaneously with the use of what we might crudely term the opposite of a Phantom Zone Projector, a stardrive repurposed the opposite way in order to produce an anti-Q Ray sprite. I have it all worked out, I promise you, but to explain it all would make even this overweight blogpost too long to be read! So suffice it to say that if these two sprites, Q and anti-Q, were to meet one another exactly at the event horizon of the black hole…then the product would be mass, exiting the event horizon at nigh on the speed of light, though getting slower as it goes. Because the anti-Q radiation will pass over the gravitational fence just as though it wasn’t even there, in exactly the manner that Q radiation can not…since anti-Q radiation is ordinarily born to cross the event horizon from the other side, but inside the black hole it has anomalous properties…is programmed, so to speak, to get onto the other side in order to cross back in. And its anomalous nature is paid for in the only way it can be paid for, which is by sucking a bit of energy out of the fifth dimension back into the four we know of, there to dwell in the black hole as part of its mass/energy budget until the Hawking Epoch at universe’s end sets it free again. So for a moment, the black hole will cease expanding, just long enough for…

…A rocketship about the mass of a man to escape it, and inside the rocketship an infant. Jor-El’s son.

Well, can you blame him?

And Krypton dies forthwith, as soon as it’s done; just a little bit ahead of schedule. No, he most definitely doesn’t tell the Science Council! He just builds the rocketship, and builds the machine. He doesn’t even tell his wife, until…

Until…

Horribly, he realizes that he’s made a miscalculation. It will all work, and the gimmicking will get little Kal-El through, but in order for the gimmicking to happen, Jor-El himself must operate the controls of the sprite/anti-sprite assembly. But then who will take the very last one-way trip into the Phantom Zone, to be the equalizing quantum of energy that kicks the rocketship out?

There is only one person who could do it…only one person who would do it. But it’s awfully hard, isn’t it? Kal-El’s mother Lara will be spit out at the end of the universe in the Hawking Epoch along with all the other Phantom Zone prisoners, there to realize that everyone and everything dies eventually despite long shots, just before arcing away on the long loop back through time to be reabsorbed by Sagittarius A at the moment of her previous self’s original banishment. But her son will live, so that makes up for it all…one hopes…

And so Lara gets into the Phantom Zone Projector, a last-minute change in plans that’s recorded nowhere and known to no one (you Bloggers are the only people in the whole Universe who know about it), and Kal-El is lovingly placed in his rocketship, and the masses balance. With the closing of a contact, 5D energy will strike the match that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows apart the house Jor-El built…and for a moment he hesitates…and then he resolutely pushes the button…and…

About forty-five thousand years ago by our reckoning, about eleven billion years ago by Jor-El’s, and just last week by his infant son’s…

…The planet Krypton, or whatever its inhabitants actually used to call it, is gone.

And little Kal-El’s rocket speeds away from the catastrophe, first at so near c as makes no difference, then slower and slower…but still it will be a long time before the ship is travelling slowly enough for relativistic time-dilation to cease isolating it from its surrounding universe. The ship’s navigational system is programmed sensitively by Jor-El to look for planets in a certain favourable band of velocity and trajectory and gamma-factor-match, that also support a biosphere favourable to humanoid life…a wish-list to be filled out as best the navigator can, in the relatively short amount of time that Kal-El has before his life-support systems peter out. Earth is basically the first planet that fits the bill, a very lucky close approximation! Because if it hadn’t been us, out past the Orion Spur is an awfully big gap of inter-spiral space, a passage that the Last Son Of Krypton probably could not have survived. In fact if it weren’t for the Orion Spur, then he probably wouldn’t have! Thus time and chance enter into all things, but faith is occasionally rewarded…down onto the Kent fields crashes the little rocketship, and the boy is found.

And what a strange boy he is! For he is not made of the regular stuff of baryonic matter that we are used to, but instead he’s made of whatever stuff is left to coagulate itself once most of the fundamental Four Forces have been re-unified. Protons? Electrons? We think — we think! — that he is at least made of something like atoms and molecules, but honestly who knows. Anyway whatever he is made of, it’s stuff that can’t be scratched by any force we know of, and so the kid is indestructible. Also, though with some effort his eyes can detect the presence of photons, it’s easier for him to see W bosons and gluons and Higgs particles and such. Neutrinos? We think he can see neutrinos, in their whore-like flexing between states…

Really, he seems to be able to see everything. Call him the obverse of Daredevil?  Sure, call him that, but as time goes on he also becomes capable of emitting his “radar sense”…with great concentration on his part, gluons stream from his eyes, capable of altering the relationship of quarks in the matter they’re directed at: it’s scarier than heat vision, but it’s more sensitive too. And who knows what other kinds of bosons his eyes might emit, as a reversed consequence of also being absorbed? With time, too, he’ll become absurdly strong, and fast, and able to leap tall buildings: not because he is “naturally” any of these things, but because as a Kryptonian he accesses the “other vector” that in the ordinary universe is hidden by virtue of its alignment with time…what is “superness”, after all? It’s merely the reconcentration of effort into arbitrary slices of “time”: Clark Kent is as strong as he needs to be because he can lift “more”…not as in lifting more weight, but as in doing more lifting! He can outrace a locomotive because the locomotive can’t double and redouble the speed it already has, but he can. When he jumps, he can sort of “hang there” in the air, prolonging what the jump is. And eventually it will look like he is flying, but he isn’t really.

Eventually it will look like he is flying through space unaided by any technology, at any arbitrary superluminal speed you care to name…! But he won’t be. It’s all 5D trickery, you see. Though people will think he is the only case of superluminal transportation not requiring some sort of technological assistance, of course it will merely look like that while really being something else…and only a few, a precious few, will notice that it’s actually impossible for him to be doing the things he’s doing.

The Guardians of the Universe.

Adam Strange.

Brainiac.

And Lex Luthor, the only scientific rival of Jor-El. Oh, Smallville happened, my friends! But in my Superman reboot the Luthor that moved there was just a little bit more aware of what was going on around him. Even for Superboy to fly, is no crazier than for him to have super-breath, and Lex sees that, sees that the one thing is no more ridiculous than the other…and, more importantly, no less ridiculous. He also notices that Superboy does not have super-hearing, but only sometimes mimics it. “My, uh…super-hearing tells me that someone’s trapped in that mine!” Because there is no Kryptonite (did you notice that?) Lex’s origin takes longer to happen; and because it takes longer to happen it is always Lex who’s putting himself in positions of peril where Superboy has to save him, and Lana Lang never even gets a chance to do so…without it looking exactly like what it is: that she’s copying Lex.

Poor Lana! Forever the object of derision, from men who should want to sleep with her yet somehow don’t…!

And as for Lex, Superboy never suspects he’s just faking, because he’s got his shit planned out. Lex Luthor, Scientific Adventurer, would of course constantly be getting into scrapes, wouldn’t he? Just as one day Lois Lane, Investigative Reporter, will get into them too. But Lex Luthor — the Smallville Daily News calls him “Mr. Action!” for a time — isn’t really a Scientific Adventurer at all, because he never goes spelunking anywhere Superboy can save him, that he hasn’t already been a week earlier when Superboy wasn’t looking. Oh, I forgot to mention…lead doesn’t block Kal-El’s W-boson vision? There is something that will block it, but it isn’t lead…

…But instead it’s the thing Lex Luthor eventually invents, once he figures out Kal-El’s implications for physics. Underneath the dimension of Time, Lex realizes, another dimension is hiding…and as well as this meaning that the universe is time-asymmetric, that there’s such a thing as true randomness outside the collapse of the wave function, and that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is incorrect, more importantly to Lex it means that a type of matter could be created that resonates strongly with the energies of the fifth dimension…so much so it almost is energy rather than matter…and actually if you placed a 5D energy “tap” near this hypothetical substance, this material that interacts so strongly with the hidden dimension…this “Kryptonite”…then the effect would be almost as a Faraday Cage? So, sure, you could use Kryptonite for all kinds of things, but there’s only one thing you couldn’t use anything but Kryptonite for, and that’s for killing Superboy…

…Which is what Lex is working on in the laboratory bunker Kal-El builds for him by the lake outside Smallville, though he says he’s working on something else: Kryptonite. 5D matter-energy hybrid substance, capable of supplying inexhaustible energy and driving perpetual-motion machines and doing God-knows-what else! But how do you know when you’ve got it?

Well, you test it.

By using it to kill Superboy.

I mean, Superboy’s not a bad sort, but we all have to make sacrifices for science?

Thus the scene in the laboratory bunker, and Superboy escapes, but in the course of his escaping Lex is rendered bald — like, five-dimensionally bald, which means “incurably bald” — and boy is it a sad day for Superboy when he discovers his former friend, the guy he actually looked up to (as a Scientific Adventurer, natch!), was actually faking it the whole time. Faking everything, even his own feelings…

…And now this guy is going to be constantly after him, trying to trap him to experiment on him some more, as Kal-El let him do back when he trusted him. Not the Scientific Adventurer getting into scrapes anymore, but the Super-Criminal trying to pull off elaborate bank robberies! It’s the same thing, really: “Superboy, come get me!” Oh, I don’t want you to think Lex Luthor is a psychopath, though, because that’s not the real nature of his villainy; actually, there’s nothing wrong with him except the choices that he makes. He thinks and feels just as you or I, Lex Luthor does, and he’s motivated by the same things…truth be told, he’s not really even that petty or selfish, it’s just that he was an abject failure everywhere he went, before Superboy befriended him and believed in him, and do you know what it’s like to be a person as smart as Jor-El and yet fail miserably at everything, not even be able to help your poor mother out with rent as you bounce endlessly from town to town because instead of making friends at new schools you always make enemies? OF THE TEACHERS, not even of the kids…but when you’re a kid, if you have a part-time guardian as an enemy then you can’t beat them; and if somehow you can beat them anyway, then you have to leave the town they’re in. Lex Luthor would be a sympathetic character, I dare say, if it weren’t for the fact that as hard as he’s had it Superman’s had it harder and still manages to be a good person…Lex never had one break except for the fact that he’s a naturally-occurring super-genius, well Kal-El never had one break except that he’s a 5D tap-site, a naturally-occurring physical marvel. Same?

…Yet Luthor is not the only person who’s interested in the 5D spigot known as Superman, and his implications for the Standard Model. There are another couple of enemies he’s got. Closest to home, there are the ex-prisoners of the Phantom Zone, already several billion years in the future cut loose and driven back through time to eventual annihilation at the event horizon of Sagittarius A…except that when the Q and anti-Q sprites went up on the last day of Krypton, as Kal-El flew over the gravitational fences like a human home run, the essences of the Phantom Zone prisoners who had been “most recently exiled” were themselves changed into a vacillating Q and anti-Q state…doomed to re-entry of the event horizon, sure enough, but occasionally able to assert the positive-matter side of their nature, and live in space and time as tangible entities for short periods of time, on their way back through time. It’s a route no less sure, but it’s weirder…longer…and, it occurs to the brighter ones among those who get to take it…

Look, the event horizon just wants a humanoid mass that’s escaped it!

It doesn’t care which one it gets!

So if Kal-El can be grabbed and tossed into the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, then Zod can go on and do what he pleases from that point, his matter/energy debt being paid by someone else. Zod, so absurdly powerful! Having everything at his disposal that Superman has, but also having his fluctuating state between matter and energy to draw on, and thus control of exotic radiative emissions that even Jor-El never foresaw! But the first time Superman meets Zod, is also the last time Zod meets Superman, since the only way for Zod to escape his fate is to find a replacement to throw into the black hole…so the first battle is fought fiercely, and Superman has the odds stacked against him! He doesn’t even know who this guy is…!

So he defeats Zod in that first/last attack, but from his point of view that doesn’t mean he can’t die later anyway…

Because the universe is fundamentally time-asymmetric, you see, but let’s leave sad old Zod for now, because he’s not the only one who’s interested in Superman either…

Because somewhere out there is a fifth-dimensional entity who because of Jor-El’s machinations has his foot caught in the gopher-hole of Sagittarius A, for the next several billion years. And how annoying this is! Eons and eons of living high off the hog of the 4D universe’s “extra” energy (they don’t really need to know there’s such a thing as true randomness, do they?), but now he’s lost status in his community, because he’s tied by a thin cord to the 4D universe, but to break the cord would cause a shocking social tumult, and so now he even has to submit to such an indignity as having a name and being a definite thing! Oh, the indignity, it is shattering. Yet he can’t simply get rid of the son of the highly-annoying Jor-El with a click of his fingers, even though he would like to, because the kid’s got a 5D shadow, a thickness, an active extension into the “other vector”…technically, he has standing in the 5D realm, even though it is abominably low standing, and that makes it difficult to vanish him away. His 5D shadow would remain, even if his 4D substance was obliterated, so for the little man with the nonsense name it just doesn’t even make any sense to blast Superman into atoms, because from his perspective that simply won’t satisfy his pique: it won’t change anything. He’s not in the same situation as the Phantom Zone criminals, we must remember: his foot is caught in Sagittarius A for a few billion years no matter what happens, so it’s only revenge he’s after and nothing more…and it’s a minor revenge at that, since he is not actually banished from his home, he just has a lot of his neighbours smirking at him all the time because he has to maintain an extension into 4D space, and manifest himself there on a regular basis. But, it isn’t even like it’s three days a week, or anything…! So, he’s a peevish little fellow, but hardly in a murderous rage, and anyway he wouldn’t do what Zod might and just kill all Superman’s friends, because frankly that’s 4D-entity thinking, even if he did want to make him “suffer” in some general sense…

…Which he doesn’t, because frankly that’s 4D-entity thinking too, the stuff that savages indulge in. In the civilized world, revenge is meaningless unless it’s proportional: if someone humiliates you, you humiliate them back, you don’t go on some killing spree or something, good heavens! Mortal vendetta against some tiny speckling from the lower dimensions?

Do you want to be even more of a laughing-stock than you already are?

And besides it isn’t Kal-El who’s humiliated Mxy, but his father, and since all who perish inside a black hole are utterly extinguished Jor-El just isn’t around to humiliate anymore…and even if he were, my God man, humiliating a corpse?…what’s happened to you…so what Mxy will do to Superman will be just a tad more complex than that, though truth be told…

…He is getting just a little bit unhealthily obsessed with the sprat?

But then it seems that must be the fate of all who are closely connected to him. More distant entities are capable of approaching the subject of Superman’s physical uniqueness in a more sensible fashion. Brainiac, for example, is no flash-in-the-pan freak like Lex Luthor, nor some tired would-be tyrant who eventually got his ass kicked by someone tougher…no. Brainiac is something of a Master Tyrant, if you like; having been in the biz for a couple thousand years now, he’s seen a lot of petty self-styled Emperors succeed brilliantly for a time through brutish force, and then inevitably get overthrown. And what was it all for? What was gained? What did anyone think would be gained? To consolidate power in your family line for a bare handful of generations, only so your line can then be extinguished when you’re overthrown, that’s…well, even for monkey thinking, you know, that’s some pretty bad excuse for making a plan. But of course, such are the inevitably rancid fruits of raw personal ambition, and there’s nothing that disgusts Brainiac more than raw personal ambition. His empire was built sustainably, for the long term not the short; his empire places a greater emphasis on persuasion than on conquest. In fact his empire enjoys nothing more than toppling petty would-be Kings and Emperors; would-be Kings and Emperors are his empire’s bread and butter, if you want to know the truth. Brainiac himself, pretty well invulnerable in his own “person”, is always the one who makes first contact with new civilizations, and no hordes of armies back him up when he does it…because he’s a lover, not a fighter. Does that sound odd, for a being at least half machine, with a computer mind? But the highest love is the love of truth, is it not? And Brainiac enjoys his exalted position for no other reason than because of all his empire’s subjects he loves truth the most, and is willing to risk the most for it. It would be so unseemly, for the man with all the power to secrete himself away in some palace, enjoying elite privileges while those less capable and less empowered go out and do the hard and dangerous work of building civilization! So he goes himself, alone and unassisted, to discover even in the dregs of the starfield the value that some more petty and personally-ambitious tyrant would scornfully choose to overlook.

For example…did you know that there’s this really backwards planet in this really insignificant little spur of a spiral arm, where a hot pinpoint of what appears to be 5D energy crisscrosses the globe righting wrongs anonymously? And the worst thing that could happen to such a remarkable and laudable kind of raw material like that would obviously be for it to fall under the sway of some unenlightened chauvinistic institution, would it not? Brainiac very rationally believes — because he holds no beliefs that are not rational — that it’s far better to intercede to preserve the good, than it is to wait until it goes bad: potential is a thing so easy to waste, you see, and that ease is itself such shocking evidence of the universe’s basic black absurdity… What if this unique energy-source, this powerful force for truth and justice (they are the same thing really), was not supported? What if it soured, and became something terrible, something that could no longer be nurtured but only done away with? Only a petty would-be tyrant waits to convince by military force when he could persuade by friendship instead…and more importantly, only a inexcusably poor philosopher (like a petty would-be tyrant) thinks the wilful squandering of resources in anything but a tragedy that we are morally-bound to prevent. Oh, Brainiac is a very benevolent guy, for sure! Like the ancient Kryptonians, all he wants is to give people the chance to improve their situations! His empire is the most technologically-advanced thing you will ever see, and all these gifts are free to every new planet he encounters! You don’t even have to join up, to get them!

There aren’t even any strings!

Just…some problems that come with a surfeit of well-being, that he can help you work out. It’s okay, every civilization experiences these problems, the trick is just to see what must be done and then to do it, quickly, minimizing the anxiety of adjustment…

But you know…Earth isn’t really there yet, honestly. Brainiac, the empire’s Chief Scout, would hesitate to put it on a diet of miracles, at this point. He’s only really interested in Superman…

And…let’s see…

Have I missed anything?

…

(thinks)

…

OH YEAH!

Something for the Doctor Who fans out there:

Kara Zor-El may still be alive.

…

There are many Superman reboots, but this one’s mine. My Superman reboot and I know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, or the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. And we will hit…

…Or, actually, we won’t, but wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? A couple of other things I might mention, because they seem like obvious questions, so I might as well answer them obviously:

Yes, the Daxamites exist. No, they have no superpowers.

Yes, the Legion of Super-Heroes exists in the…uh, thirty-first century now, I guess? Although, remember: time is asymmetric…

Yes, the Justice League of America exists…Batman and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and the Atom and the Flash and all the rest of it…Green Lantern’s power works on a very advanced form of the “stargate” technology alluded to earlier, the Flash’s power comes from a future event he calls “the Crisis” (which if you are very clever, or alternatively if I have not been very clever, you may be able to figure out what it is without me telling you), and the Atom has some bullshit story about finding a chunk of “white dwarf matter”? Hey, the Atom’s obviously a big liar…

Yes, Luthor and Brainiac form an alliance. At a certain point.

Yes, Terra-Man exists. And he’s actually VERY IMPORTANT…

(Hmm, these are mostly “yes” things…that’s probably good…)

Yes, Legion ’89 basically happens, though not for the same reasons. Because…

No, there’s no such thing as a “metagene”.

No, Invasion! never happens. Not strictly-speaking.

Yes, Adam Strange could probably beat Superman in a fight. He’s an extremely ingenious fellow, that Adam Strange…!

No, there really, really, REALLY is no Multiverse.

No, the JSA doesn’t exist…and furthermore never did exist, not really.

(Oh dear, some of these “no” things are going to cause problems, I fear…)

(And I thought I was doing so well…!)

Yes, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman exists, and is in continuity, with just the slightest tweak, just a sentence or two.

(…What, no one wanted to know that?)

Yes, post-Crisis, we will have the Wally West Flash of Baron and Messner-Loebs.

Yes, Jimmy Olsen exists, I just haven’t mentioned him except parenthetically as “Mr. Action” (sorry, Jimmy), and all the rest of the Planet crew exists as well…even Steve Lombard…heck, Lois even still takes pity on Clark occasionally and comes over to Clinton Street to cook him boeuf bourgignon…

Superman still has his Fortress of Solitude, too…

And, oh!  A bunch of other stuff which I mostly haven’t mentioned because I mostly forget, but isn’t it interesting how giving Superman a very specific sort of reboot changes just a whole shitload of things?

And, oh yeah, almost forgot to remind you…

…

Kara Zor-El may still be alive.

…

Hey, it’s a bit late for April Fool’s, but here I am…!

Always leaving too early and arriving too late, but I hope you enjoyed this frivolity I made for you, Bloggers! Yes; I don’t like the whole “it’s so fun to play mean tricks on your friends and family, because they’re arbitrarily not allowed to get mad, ha ha!” thing…I think we should give meaningless gifts instead. Foolish gifts.

I fancy I’ve got a gift for foolishness, me.

Well…proof enough? Fifth-dimensional petit bourgeois, Kryptonian criminal aristos…and Space-Lenin, for God’s sake?

None of them know why they can’t help but get so darned involved with that Superman…!

But only Lex Luthor knows, and is he ever jealous! Poor failed Comrade Luthor, he was so promising once at the rallies…he spoke so well…

But then the Secretary’s daughter went and fell in love with that awful Bingo Little fellow.

With his suspicious friends.

So, not really very much unlike me, then?

AS I ALWAYS SUSPECTED

Isn’t that strange?

I was just so sure, you know, that it was something like Misfits Of Science writ large and sloppy…something cheap and tawdry and full of the awful hard light that suffuses (it seems) every singly little audiovisual thing with the slightest of science-fictional components these days. And the pushbutton feelings. Not that I don’t go to the movies in order to have my buttons pushed, you understand! I may be a bit different, but I’m not that different…but these are the wrong buttons, these things that I guess we can blame James Cameron for, or something. Action movies; they oppress me, bit by bit. On the whole, they seem to me to be devoid of positive feeling, lacking something I don’t-know-quite-what, that I’m always looking for. “Positive feeling”, though, it sounds absurd…what is that, anyway? What can I possibly mean? Surely I don’t mean just “happy endings”…

Well, no. I don’t. Although I certainly don’t disdain happy endings, and it bothers me excessively when filmmakers seem to…when they’ve written a happy-ending story and then don’t want it, it isn’t good enough for them, so they invent all these tortured methods of ineptly subverting that textual expectation. All in the name of making me feel something, but I don’t feel anything at all when a non-happy ending is tacked-on…no more than I feel when a happy one is tacked-on! And so both are “negative”; both have the odour of something made by committee, even if it’s only a committee of one. And it would be so convenient to be able to stop right there, and say I’ve sorted it out: blah blah something something true to the story, whatever story it is, but that won’t cover what it is to lack positive feeling, because what about the stories that get that part right and then still lack it? Have you seen Avatar? I swear, I tried to watch it, you know? But I couldn’t stay with it, it was so ridiculously, insultingly hollow. I watched more of Transformers 2 — no, really, I did! — and to this day am often caught wondering just how James Cameron managed to fuck up his magnum opus just so, so badly, that watching Transformers 2 was a more joyous experience for me by comparison. I mean, no one can accuse him of not having the love, can they? Of not having the vision?

But I guess it was the wrong kind of love…the wrong kind of vision. The hyperreal simulation was certainly a most extravagant metatextual device, but the different things to look at business that draws us to the movie theatre was somehow an itch not even the supreme attainment of the hyperreal could scratch: Avatar was just so damned boring, wasn’t it? Boring perfection. I was talking to someone not long ago about the boringness of perfection, with specific reference to Jim Lee and Geoff Johns — one a weirdly-driven renderer of some kind of ideal Batman splash page that dwells only inside his own head, with apparently very rigorous standards that are nonetheless unfathomable to me, and the other a crazy nitpicking completist with standards of plot-tidiness I can only assume are similar. All some weird bubble of Outsider Art, fooling the eye with the trappings of legitimacy? Steve Ditko and Dave Sim and even Alan Moore can’t match that stuff when it comes to outre, you know…they’re just mavericks, who drop into and out of public respectability according to what they’re working on, not full-blown extremists. Dave Sim may believe some crazy things about what the Bible says, but say this for him anyway: he’s concerned with what’s real, even if he gets it wrong. Because there is a certain standard of representation of things in Sim’s work, you know? Which imposes a certain set of beliefs in, approaches to, the adoption of form? Whereas Johns and Lee…

Well, it reminds me of something Werner Herzog said: that he couldn’t think of any film that the new 3D technology would be useful for. Except, possibly, a pornographic film. Which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say, because…hmm, yeah, wouldn’t that be just a terrifying art film? The terror of the hyperreal! Absolute widescreen super-clarity brought to a sex act! You can practically smell the lotion, in the brilliance of the Klieg lights you can see what attention porn stars pay to personal hygiene! All absolutely beyond clinical, thirty feet tall and coming at you…yes, that ought to terrify us: the living autopsy of sex. How we’d long for Jason to come along and inject a little assuaging fantasy into it by chopping up the partners in a ludicrously comic-booky way! But one must presume that in the world of hyperreal sex-on-film there can be no thought any longer of fantasies, our glorious Ludwig Van simply ruined forever…from now on even the sight of a soft-focus Susan Oliver or Yvonne Craig will drive us to the wastepaper basket in reflexive recollection of why we can no longer have such nice romantic things…

…Or maybe not, but anyway: is there any boredom more boring than the boredom of perfection? So for me Avatar was just the pushing of dead buttons, and I couldn’t stand the thing. Because there was no positive feeling to it at all! Though I still haven’t managed to define what that is, I know, and maybe I don’t really need to invoke it when I’m talking about a crummy militarized ripoff of “The Word For World Is Forest”? Ye gods, a militarized “Word For World”, and with VR sex in it too. This is Simpsons-parody stuff, obviously…there’s nowhere to go with any of that but down…

For God’s sake, who thinks of making Ursula LeGuin stories for gearheads, you know? Positive feeling?

It never even gets a chance, in Avatar!

But fortunately we aren’t really talking about Avatar.

But we’re talking about Push, instead.

So, I figure it ought to be axiomatic, that anything that looks like it was published by Eclipse Comics has got THRILL-POWER. Well, I say “Eclipse”, which of course was only one company among many that pursued what Tom Spurgeon calls the Third Way of Eighties superhero comics, but I can’t list all of them, can I? Anyway we will get back to this thrill-power thing in more detail in a minute, but the reason I bring it up is because damn if Push doesn’t look JUST LIKE something that fell out of Eclipse in the Eighties, you know? I actually had to check to see it hadn’t been made from a comic, something around the time of The Crow, perhaps…or Mage…or even Luther Arkwright…

And imagine my delight, to find out it hadn’t been! Though it should’ve been: since that passionate inkiness, that start-again freshness, is all over it. Those lessons learned in the alternative scene, that particular kind of framing of a shot — comics-style set-pieces, Welles by way of Kurosawa by way of Ditko by way of Talbot by way of Sim, if you’re of my vintage you can’t not notice it…all that stuff comes right up to you and pushes a pie in your face, and the pie is delicious. What this is, is a black-and-white comic of the Eighties finally printed with the colouring they could never afford, lovingly painted — no, lacquered — in amplified hue. Did I mention that I thought I was going to hate it? That I thought all those tricks of hard light were going to be present in it? I should’ve remembered to say something about love, which is that if you’ve got the right kind of it then even cliche can make you feel something…because it wasn’t the hard light this time, but the other thing, the ratcheted palette, you know that thing where they fuck with the colour-balances and make everything orange and blue? That’s an awful programmatic cliche too, along with the shaky-cam of Hollywood-verite that became so inescapable so suddenly in the late Nineties, was never used right, I think they even film Jeopardy! that way now…and the soundtrack, the soundtrack, the endless music-videoness of the soundtrack, as though the best thing the committee that thought the thing up could imagine was to get a music-video director to make their X-Men cash-in product…my God, so much is the same, here, as it is everywhere else…!

And yet somehow, it’s really beautiful.

My apologies for being all scattery here, it’s just that I really do have so much to say about Push, too much to ever say in a blog-post anyone will bother to read, so I have to jump from place to place, quickly point and say “see?”, and then hop off to another lilypad. Because it is all about seeing, as it’s all about that old “Eclipse” soul. It’s all a bit half-assed and derivative, it’s Scanners cut with Lost In Translation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Tomorrow People…and Donnie Darko and X-Men, so it’s mod, it’s trad, it’s got all the mad cons and the retread cred, but it also has just something…something of my own little list of cult-classic movies, Dark Star and Sixteen Candles and Repo Man, things I could watch and watch and watch, because every time I watched them I found I could fall just a little deeper into their little worlds, get that much more absorbed into their texture, like becoming their wallpaper, becoming their character. I’ve never liked Chris Evans as much as I’ve liked him here, so much (perhaps) like me in the period of my twenties when I was cut loose in the demimonde. Because in the demimonde it’s all about origins, all the time: you barely know your own, and you don’t know anyone else’s, but origin swirls about you everywhere you go. Well, at Eclipse it was the same! Those breakaway Eighties artists who were still for some reason stuck on the superheroes, you know? And specifically on the intrigue of the superheroes as manifested primarily by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made by them perhaps mostly by accident at first — that weird world of secret connectivity, subway tunnels of causation rumbling beneath the streets of apparent happenstance, the miracle of fantasy stories as disconnected as they were outrageous nevertheless being slowly knitted into a giant tapestry of extremely uneasy threads. The origin is always the most important thing, so important that you’ll notice they made a bestselling reprint book out of it, one of my top ten Christmas gifts ever…because to the comics readers who started around the time I did, the origin story was always the one you could never get, never find, only see in later versions done as summaries or flashbacks by later artists, the genuine article only hinted at, alluded to, seen through a prism and all that rot. So valuable, and I fancy the later Eighties renegades felt it deeply too: when in making up their own superhero mythos they successfully kept “origin” in some way always occluded, thus in some way always implicated, in their (importantly!) new stories.

And in Push, the same pattern is followed…and, interestingly at least to me, it isn’t a million miles away from James Cameron’s metatextual strategy in Avatar, except it’s got the one thing that movie hasn’t got!

A testimonial…!

Or, no…waitaminute…yes, that’s right, I’ve got it now…

A heart.

Chris Evans, bruised expatriate failure, is competent in every way except the one that counts…at home (if a little fucked-up) in his limbo, his island of stilts in no-man’s land, where the overlapping spheres of authority just don’t quite touch one another as they’re supposed to…youth, with plenty of time but no purpose, in a space where he can go unobserved for at least (if he is lucky) weeks at a time. Origin flows forth here, as a rising tide, as stormwater welling up from an underground lake, and we are ankle-deep in it already: so like it or not, it connects us all, though the fondest wish of youth is still to be free…

And then later on you find out that “being free” and “doing good” are really the same thing. Uh…

Spoilers?

Well, he does a really good job of conveying it, and he doesn’t even say much. “Hard light” would have him come to an onerous realization with a bowed head in a blue light, all suddenly self-knowing, but Push gives him an orange light and lets him do things he has to with no time to really think about them, much less make a confessional speech…and even less than much-less could he formulate one. Comics? It’s comics; because you know that one character who’s the girl? Dakota Fanning plays her here, somehow managing the nifty trick of fitting in perfectly with all the “guy from that show” character-actor faces…and such attractive faces they are, all of them! Some really major part of the credit must go to the casting, here, because the only person you see who looks like a movie star is the one person who’s kind of supposed to, the well-known noir Oracle visited by everyone from William Powell to Bob Hope to Harrison Ford to Keanu Reeves…and, sorry, that isn’t much of a spread, but I was going for a specific effect there? Which is going to fail, now, because I have not yet come all the way back around to THRILL-POWER…!

But never mind that now, though ol’ Ming-Na is framed just so Eclipse-like in her Oracle’s Den? There’s actually a longer movie here, one senses; or, should that be “a bigger story”? Some of what happens doesn’t really make sense, and interestingly (again: to me!) it’s in just those parts where blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-that-didn’t-add-up, that the action coheres into something you can care about. Well, was it not ever thus, with cult-classic movies? Did Brother From Another Planet never hand you a bag and say “hold this for me a minute, I just gotta talk to a guy”? At such moments is the audience truly involved, as they reason past the infelicities on their characters’ behalf. People rarely look right at the camera in this movie; everything is drenched in neon; if the building’s being shaded, she won’t be able to see it; anything with shrimp. Plate O’ Shrimp. The story has a happy ending, because it was always meant to, but there are still tortured steps because we’re missing ten minutes: ten minutes of explicated cause, for some of the odder necessary things that happen.

Ten minutes of origin.

It should have bothered me. There are so many movies that just needed that one line left in, for things to make sense, and it always bothers me, it bothers me, it bothers me when they leave it out anyway. But, those are movies in which the sensemaking is really the main thing: the perfect movies, that were not quite perfect. But, have you seen Avatar?

So maybe I’d better rethink this. Maybe a movie filled with cliches, basically composed of cliches, can’t really be about doing them “right”? After all, was not the thing I liked about Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that they weren’t afraid to make a virtue of inconsistency? The plot in Push is so familiar, you know…and the solution to the problem is familiar too, and it’s all familiar. I’ve seen this movie, this comic, before…and perhaps that’s the point. Have you ever watched Donnie Darko with the commentary track on?

“Uh…yeah, that’s another thing that was…uh, I mean originally there was a scene that explained all that, but we had that hard 98-minute limit and…uh…”

Fucking breaks your heart. Fucking breaks your heart, but consider this: Donnie Darko wasn’t all that shit-hot of a movie, honestly. The ideas that were left out were just boilerplate, I will go so far as to say laboured, SF ideas; the only really important things about it are a) the rabbit, and b) the girl riding up on her bike asking what’s going on. And the ability to be absorbed into that little world over and over again, and deeper each time (as I know many people are and have been) is probably in part down to — though it breaks your heart to hear the guy tell it, it really does! — its ultimately disheartening imperfection. Push doesn’t really suffer from as much of that, but there are enough vagueries to satisfy anyone if they care to search them out: part of it’s the setting, an aggressively non-specific Hong Kong that nevertheless looks specific as hell…all the places are intact, with all their marvellous specific gritty detail, but the sense is not, and actually the places are not either because they’re all covered in this weird wash. There is a bit where young Dakota Fanning gets drunk and talks about being “…power in my youth!” and it adds nothing at all, except it does. Hmm, I wonder how far back this thing stretches, this set of associations called up by her transgression? The bit about the 13 year-old wanting some booze is punched up a bit, as though the general principle of the rules being partly suspended in Hong Kong (though you never know how much you can count on that, or when it will work for you or against you!) is being accentuated…however it isn’t too much work to associate it with the idea of youth being a suspended state that pops up in…oh, that movie Rich Kids, maybe? The World Of Henry Orient, possibly? I don’t mean to suggest that every person who makes a movie or a comic is just so conscious of their own influences that they sit down and map them all out, you understand…I mean, probably most of these influences are just my own and no one else’s, but the thing is that I like it, and the movie frames and poses and shoots things in such a fortuitous way that it helps me to make those connections. Everything looks like something; most of the time I can’t figure out what it looks like. A while ago I was talking about how I became attracted to opera for its comic-like qualities: the production of mere tableaux, within which exposition takes place! It’s a tough trick to pull off, honestly. Because it really puts enormous pressure on the ability to deliver a performance, you know? Action movies, or the parts of movies that consist of action, are more like dance: not about tableaux, but instead about tableau’s opposite. But in those, although you can certainly fuck it all up if you don’t know what you’re doing, at least you don’t have the problem of action being decoupled from motion. But the tableaux, the tableaux, they all have to make action take place in the pose, right? And so it’s all about the quality of performance that happens when you’re stuck there.

In my opinion: some mighty good performances here. But!

Blink and you’ll miss them.

My God, how I wish now this had been an Eclipse comic, so I could haunt used bookstores and try to track it down. The missing origin. In a way it’s quite a simple thing, this evanescence of a thrill that we’re constantly seeking in all our switch-flipping and button-pushing — as I said, we go to the movies primarily to see things, to do the fine act of seeing, and so who wants to see the same thing all the time? There needs to be something in it that sings to us, and the only thing that sings is difference…mood, tone, staging, performance, a set of evoked associations, commentary, colour, sound, costumes…the glimmer of an idea, the shadow of a purpose. Remix culture is a powerful tool for the constellation of meaning, but (as I also said up above, or maybe just implied) it needs some sort of love to drive it. Without the love, it’s all just so many flashpots going off in sequence: as mere pyrotechnics is loosed upon the world. And thus though it’s pretty easy to specify what interests a person when they go to the movies, still all the parts and pieces can be in order and the thing can fail to intrigue anyway. Evanescence: it’s, like, a thing, y’know? Consider, for example, the little matter of THRILL-POWER that I promised I’d get back to: though I believe the term first arises at Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, and later becomes woven into the skin of 2000 A.D., if it means anything past a marketing line then it means the top fraction of a distillation process — what you get when you bring industrial pressures to bear on a bunch of talented and subversive artists, and set them to grinding out Product on the factory floor, slipping in jokes when the boss-man ain’t looking and winking at one another conspiratorially…as if there were any other way to wink. It isn’t the only kind of art, by any means; but it’s the only one that promises such a strange and nebulous quality of success. So thrill-power is really a dream, you know: a dream of value. But with a most peculiar inflection. “We can make something out of this”, or “this can be important, somehow”, are thoughts that (it seems to me) can’t help but lie at the back of the cave of industrial relations even if for most working people it’s only slumbering there — tell the truth in art, and you can change the world, even if the art is of a degraded or twisted kind. And, you can still collect your paycheque!

Because the suits will never know!

Wink wink. Alert readers may be dismayed to see a shadow of my preoccupation with the Sufis and the Grail and alchemy here, once again, but don’t worry I won’t plunge us into all that right now…I never do get all the way into it anyway, you see, because in the back of my head there is still a tiny undergraduate looking for a senses-shattering term paper topic, and he’s saving “Magic Is Green: Colour As Icon In Twentieth-Century Fiction” for himself…so suffice it to say that the promise of bringing something wonderful and artistically-significant and world-renewing out of the atmosphere of the sweatshop is a promise with an unusually intense odour of transcendence about it. BUT!

It doesn’t have to be the sweatshop, where it’s found. Take my useful catch-all stand-in “Eclipse”, for example: which had that same stuff, that same energy, but located in the spirit of competition with the sweatshop; rather than in the paradoxical glamour of the sweatshop itself, where you get away with stuff just like a rogueish movie hero whose spirit can’t be broken though they beat him. Well, okay, okay…and maybe that glamour’s real, and relatively uncomplicated, but you don’t have to live too long to realize it’s better to write the movie than to be a character in it? Especially a character who dies in the second act because he’s everybody’s favourite, and that’ll make the jaded punters feel something? Except it’ll really only make them more jaded, probably, and anyway life’s not a movie and surely there are some better endings to be had than just these old ones where everyone loses. There was a young fellow online recently who had the idea that there are some movies that are, uh, “tonal chimeras”, where there’s a slip-point in the movie’s middle: what the movie concludes as, is not what it began as. Much like any old youthful adventure of living? So what Lee and Kirby made at Marvel Comics, as it turned out (at least: for a while) was a thing that others could do as well, in co-ops or collectives that served their labour more faithfully…okay, and sometimes it stank, because the love wasn’t really there, or it was the “wrong kind” — a useful rule of thumb might be that the more it looked like Marvel or DC, the more purely spectacular it seemed, then the less respectable it was in other ways? — and no one’s saying that nobody got screwed over again just by tinier sweatshops this time, because obviously they did, but that promise, THAT PROMISE, when it was there could never be mistaken. So hard to put one’s finger on it! But then it’s always hard to put one’s finger on an aroma…

The aroma, in some sense, of reality. Positive feeling; maybe that’s all it is, in the end? Or, all it needs to be? I rather like the idea of life being like a “tonal chimera”, that starts as the seed-pod of one implied meaning and then ends up as quite another: like walnuts from the cherry tree, your old thermodynamic miracle. So many bad movies, that bail on their original conception, what they “want” to be in their soul! Loathsomely dismal endings to hopeful stories, panderingly curative endings to hard-nosed ones! Yet in art as in life, sometimes what you want from your adventure changes along the way. So, maybe that kid’s righter than he knows? Maybe this is the kernel of every good story, that the thing you want changes along the way? Maybe every movie is a “tonal chimera”?

I still don’t know what “positive feeling” is, sad to say; I’m currently entertaining the possibility that it’s nothing but the filmmaker having interests all his or her own, and influences all his or her own too. I don’t really know if James Cameron has interests and influences like that. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course he must, he’s a person after all? But I just mean, as a friend once pointed out to me, he only makes action movies?

Only makes action movies.

And the sickly thought occurs: what is it that a person does, when they only do one thing, to branch out once they start to get bored with it?

James Cameron Pour L’Homme.

People, it is probably only a matter of time…

But I had better stop hopping now. Hey, do me a favour and go watch Push, eh? I’d really like to know what you think of it.

Or what it makes you think of.

Or if I’m just crazy for liking it.

But here’s to positive feeling, eh?

Wherever she may lie, God bless her.

“Thank you for seeing me under such false pretenses,” I say.

And there is a long pause.

…

…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Well, you are definitely NOT from the Little Persons’ Association of British Columbia.

PLOK:  Uh…an old drinking buddy of mine was its VP, for a couple of years?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Yeah?  What years were those?

PLOK:  Uhmm…like somewhere around 1993?

PETER DINKLAGE: I am really not very happy about this, this is kind of…what’s the word?  BAD.

PLOK:  I apologize.

PETER DINKLAGE:  I’m really not sure I have any reason to accept your apology.  Let me ask you this — I mean, I know I’m inverting the regular roles of interviewer and interviewee here, I hope you don’t mind though?

PLOK:  Sure.

PETER DINKLAGE:  So let me ask you this:  are you a crazy person?

PLOK:  I’m not.

PETER DINKLAGE:  In my experience, though, a lot of crazy people don’t know they’re crazy people.  So why are you here?

PLOK:  I just have this one question,although it might sound like a bit of a…

PETER DINKLAGE:  (raises eyebrow)

PLOK:  …A, an, huh, an…untoward question, perhaps…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Is it about my sex life?

PLOK: …What?

PETER DINKLAGE:  A lot of crazy people want to know about my sex life.  Are you a crazy person who wants to know about my sex life?

PLOK:  What?  No!

PETER DINKLAGE:  Why, does the idea that I might have a sex life offend you?  Are you that sort of crazy person?

PLOK:  No, I…NO!!

PETER DINKLAGE:  “No”.

PLOK:  That’s right: NO.

PETER DINKLAGE:  Okay.  (leans back)  So what’s your untoward question?

PLOK:  Uh…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Oh, c’mon.  You see all these camerapeople, right?  And makeup people? I’m getting interviewed in like twenty minutes, I’ve literally got another five seconds to decide about you and that’s ALL.  And honestly I think I’ve been quite generous alrea…

PLOK:  …WHAT WAS IT LIKE PLAYING A DWARF ON “GAME OF THRONES”?!

PETER DINKLAGE:  …

PETER DINKLAGE:  …Are you fucking serious?

PLOK:  It’s a legitimate question, isn’t it?  You have to admit it’s a legitimate question.  An important question.  A question nobody’s asked, and nobody’s going to ask.  A question…(Dinklage goggles)..uh, I don’t suppose I could have a glass of water?…(Dinklage gestures to a bodyguard, who grabs me up out of my chair)…or if you have a handkerchief that would be good, it’s awfully hot in here?…(the bodyguard strongarms me to the door)…LOOK YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THAT EVEN GOOD LP ACTORS ALWAYS PLAY LP ROLES, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, DON’T WE PETER?!  And the writers don’t know, and the directors don’t know, but you always have to bring your personal experience of dwarfism or whatever LP thing you’ve got to the role, because no one else will, and it’s an interesting problem for a serious actor, but fucking “Game Of Thrones” is set in this weird world where being a dwarf is totally different, there are all these power relations, the dwarf dude is born rich for one thing, so how do you draw on your experience to communicate the truth of that character, did you do research into LP people in the Middle Ages, do you feel it’s essentially a modern-day show with fantasy window-dressing so you can just lean back on your Shakespeare, or does it make you think about the architecture of the modern world in a new way or do you read up on Mozart or…?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Okay, let him go.

PLOK:  (ostentatiously dusts down)  Well.  So like I was saying, I’m NOT interested in your sex life;  I’m only interested in your acting process.

PETER DINKLAGE:  Wow, you are lucky I am nice.

PLOK:  Lucky, yeah;  that’s another thing I wanted to ask you about.  I don’t know what you’re like personally, but you sure play sharp characters a lot.  Do you think it’s…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Dude, I seriously cannot answer more than one question from you, okay?  You are asking me about my life experience, and honestly, I will not lie to you, there is a book forthcoming.  There is a book forthcoming.  You look like you’re about the same age as me, and you say you’ve got a friend who was the VP of a Little Persons’ Association?

PLOK:  Yeah…

PETER DINKLAGE:  So maybe you’ve thought about it a little…I guess you would’ve had to think about it just to ask your, huh, AMAZINGLY IN POOR TASTE QUESTION, so you probably know:  my career is like something I would’ve been made fun of for imagining myself in, when I was a kid.  And as fortunate as I’ve been we are not even there yet, as far as me getting to play Hamlet in a movie…you know?

PLOK:  Yes, sure…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Or even Macbeth.  But the time is coming.  This is like the presentation of African-Americans in movies, how it slowly changed.  You went from insanely superstitious human versions of (basically) Labrador Retrievers…

PLOK:  Er…

PETER DINKLAGE:  That is NOT for publication, damn you!  But the treatment of minorities, I have to tell you if you get to the status of “lovable pets” instead of “burnable wood” then you’ve got a potential step up in the future, as shitty as that sounds.  Start as a spaniel and eventually you can be Denzel, and kick ass intellectually, and be the boss, and have the boss’ problems, all from that lowliest position…but start as a diseased rat, you know, and see how far you get!  So right now my people are fighting to get into the living rooms of the nation, I would be a dwarf Redd Foxx if I thought it would help, but fortunately I’m in a position to play a dwarf James Garner, so I’ll take that jump and hope it sticks…and I’m just glad I don’t have to play a fucking dwarf Lassie.  The LP community, we have gone through this same sequence as black people in their long struggle, though not for the same reasons, but the black experience in America, that’s sometimes a mirror for us, and an inspiration.  An icebreaker for us:  people don’t even appreciate how the black experience in America has changed the white experience in America…as far as acting goes, I mean I might not be able to play Hamlet yet, but I sure as hell could play House, right?  But, what makes inroads for LP people?  How do we get to the point where I could play Hugh Laurie’s dramatic role?  You asked a question about sharpness before, that I would say is pretty perspicacious of you, because there’s a real key thing there about what access is, culturally…

PLOK:  Wait, wait.  You could play “House”, somehow, because of Denzel?

PETER DINKLAGE:  That’s correct.  Well…it’s just one man’s opinion, but…

PLOK:  How the hell does that work?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Like I said, my friend:  there is a book forthcoming.  But, not until the right fucking time, you know what I mean?

PLOK:  But…

PETER DINKLAGE:  BUT, this is all shit we can only say in private right now.  And, I say again, you can’t quote me.  I go and do volunteer things, I show up at community centers, I do videochat and I answer a lot of hand-written mail…I’m all over North America, I am supportive of my community, I’ve got frequent-flier miles like you wouldn’t believe, and pages and pages of speeches, I am the Taylor Swift, I am the fucking CELINE DION, of young people like me who want to do just anything, but the time is not right for non-LP gentlemen and ladies to hear what we say when we talk in confidence, and I need your agreement on this.  Don’t you think I would’ve talked about what it was like to play a dwarf in “Game Of Thrones”, if I thought even for a second that was something anybody would hear?  Modern corn-fed America isn’t ready to accept us yet, there’s a lot of prejudice, there’s a lot of violence…I want to be the Denzel, I only fucking wish I could be the Michael Jordan…or the Muhammad Ali…but somebody else will be that one day…fuck, I’m probably nothing more than the Al Jolson, really…

PLOK:  Er…I think that was Billy Barty, actually?  The Al Jolson?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Right, get him the fuck out of here, though, will you guys?  Don’t hurt him at all.  After all, the Paiutes say a crazy man’s a holy man…and we wouldn’t want to make God angry, would we?

PETER DINKLAGE:  (mutters) Make that fucker angry, who knows what kind of shit he’ll give you to deal with…

…

And then the door closes, and then I am escorted politely to the elevator.  I hit the street and turn to the beach and think…

“Oh SHIT!“

Now after all that I’m gonna be in trouble with Sarah too.

But today, getting out of bed to embark on various travels, the first thought that flitted through my mind was not why busfare costs so goddamn much now, but…

…How are people who get prescription lenses for their Borg Glasses going to fare, when they are made to take them off?  It’s a neat little trap, really;  if you come to my house wearing them, you won’t be wearing them for long, so you’d better hope to God you don’t need them to see, right?  Perhaps it is, again, like the Tale Of One Red Cent — Google feeling very comfortable offloading problems of etiquette and capability onto the poor saps who either a) buy their crap, or b) elect not to buy it.  If you get prescription lenses for these things then you’re the most captive of captive audiences:  having spent a very pretty penny indeed, just to be unable to do without them.  So then what is it that I am supposed to do, then, for my friends who are stuck with appliances that affect me when they wear them?  The only thing I can do, is make them into former friends…

…In an interestingly pointless restaging of the argument about freedom of choice we already have about almost everything:  chili dogs, cigarettes, parking spots, restaurant dumpsters. jaywalking, pet ownership, recycling, alcohol sales, vegetarianism, soft-drink consumption, bicycle paths and government spending…art, obscenity…breast-feeding on airplanes, and browsing in bookstores…the list goes ever on, but AT LEAST in the current moment we are spared such “debate” about prostheses, eh?

“Please take off your leg, if you’re going to come in here.”

“Hearing aids are not permitted in the theatre.”

“Before we can admit you, you’ll need a note from your orthodontist.”

“This building is a Wheelchair-Free Zone…”

It’s a funny thing, because we never think about it:  there’s a whole layer of technology we use and benefit from every single day, that is essentially passive.  Spectacles and shoes, you know?  And other Neutral Public Objects.  A whole other kind of Commons that we never consider, because we don’t have to;  a whole other set of technological tools and devices that we are free to mind our own business about.  You want to talk about infrastructure, well this is a very important kind of it…it’s easy to defend the publicly-owned neutrality of city sidewalks by taking a moment to mess up advertising that someone has power-washed into them, and thankfully there is no kind of skywriting that isn’t by its nature temporary:  for all the space around things that people own that is hotly contested and furiously argued-over, there is ten times or a hundred times or a thousand times the space around such things that it is not necessary to contest, or that is so easy to contest that antisocial opportunism can’t find a foothold there.  So, sure, behind this door you will either find the Lady or the Tiger, but all the other doors are just plain doors:  they go somewhere, and are for passing through.  They function, essentially, as doors.  You don’t have to notice them.

But behind every door, sooner or later — if Silicon Valley has its way — will lie either the Barcode or the Reader.  And can we sustain our lives, our everyday personal lives, if that becomes the new way things work?  Bad things happen when the spirit of capitalization hits the public investment in utilities, when infrastructure becomes commodified — the Enron COO dude didn’t set out to shut down hospitals, I am sure, but unfortunately for him he was only visionary enough to see what could be gained by profit-taking, and not what could be lost.  Sergei Brin sounds very comical indeed when he talks about how it makes him feel more of a Man not to have to carry around a phone in his pocket — if I had a bit more leisure at this exact moment I could churn out a couple thousand words about that Very Interesting assertion of his without breaking a sweat — hmm, and maybe I will, later:  I think it’s more interesting than has been noticed! — but what will happen if people start to feel like Real Man’s Men wearing Google Glass will not be so bloody comical.  Mad Emperor Sergei is kind of right, you see:

You will enjoy a feeling of power, if you wear these things.

Because, know it or not…you will enjoy the exercise of power by wearing them.

But if you are only about as visionary as that Enron guy, you probably won’t see that power relations always have the same character, regardless of what the technology looks like:  always stand for the same basic sort of choice.  And when you inject power relations into areas of life where they didn’t previously apply…

(Hey, and it actually turns out that you can make a great deal of money that way, you know?)

…Then every person becomes a door, behind which lies either fortune or disaster.

And you’ll have to open every goddamn one of them, just even when you go to the store to buy bananas.

Personally, I don’t like your chances.