C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁

One Person's Future Is Another Person's Garbage.

2010-02-14T23:45:00.001-08:00

Last of the found issues of mid-last-century speculative fiction journals:

First, two different takes on what the control centers of the ships that could theoretically take us beyond the borders of our dirt-encrusted world might potentially look like if we were given the chance to visit the captain once our vessel had established the low Earth orbit equivalent of cruising altitude and gotten a pair of cheap plastic wings pinned to our shirtfront:

The September 1957 issue of The Original Science Fiction startles us right out of the gate by using the voids between the "windshield" as a masthead, bringing the details below it into sharp contrast. Ignoring for a moment the heartland-precociousness of the underage pilot and the father-figure general on the viewscreen tearing him a new one, (plus the fact that he appears to have plotted a course for oblivion) the control panel of whatever doomed spaceship Opie is driving looks pretty progressive for the time. We know now, in the future, that we weren't going to be able to zoom around in space like we did over Germany in the Big One, and the design of the ship reflects that practicality by omitting the control stick in favor of a multitude of dials and buttons. (still, in true inbred sci-fi fashion, none of them are labeled) Impressive detail, right down to the hobbyist magazines shoved underneath the desk.

The cover of Imaginative Tales from November 1956, on the other hand, literally looks like we caught the artist in the middle of a self-portrait, Norman Rockwell-style. In fact, it's difficult to tease out the context of the art at all; is the Richard Baseheart impersonator a pilot or a Mission Control stooge? Is he peering out a porthole or viewing the action remotely? Is that an EKG display or is he just tuning in Radio Free Europe on the shortwave? The only clue is the rocketship on the viewscreen, and since the guy is clearly not an alien, (true, he could very well be, given aliens' tendency towards disguising themselves as humans and injecting themselves into Earth society; but to be fair, this is a conceit more likely exploited in television and film. An alien that looks just like a human is cheaper than designing makeup and prosthetics.) we can safely assume that the ship depicted is an Earth ship under attack from meteorites or beams from an unknown origin. Because as the taxonomy of sci-fi (nonverbally) states: rocketships, humans, good. Saucers, aliens, bad.

Next, damsels (OF THE FUTURE) in distress, and the miniskirts (OF THE FUTURE) they wear:

In the 1950s version of the future, the combination of a high-hemmed skirt and a traumatic event, like say, an alien invasion, apparently causes a spontaneous paralyzation of the lower extremities below the waist for the unlucky women who happen to be sporting such a progressive fashion. The cover of Imagination Science Fiction from October 1957 attempts to document one such case, as poor Sally Saturn collapses in a heap under the combined weight of her micro-fiber Eloi-style tunic and the onslaught of marauding turtle-men in rocket-propelled flower pots. Although, from the looks of the primary blast pattern, it could be argued that the attackers aren't attacking at all, but evacuating, and silly Sally was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, after having emerged from the air duct into the launch bay. The antagonists also apparently wield weapons that discharge blasts of radioactive Cheerios.

As for the action on the cover of the same publication eight months earlier, either the moment captured is within the first few moments after duress is engaged where Jenny Jupiter, (very sharp in a red-planet-red number by Yves Saint Martian) is balanced between standing and crumpling into a pile of dirty laundry. Or perhaps, given the spaceport setting, the environment is under the influence of artificially-generated gravity less than Earth standard, allowing Jenny to retain the illusion of remaining upright, when in fact she has no lower body strength left at all. Or maybe she's just managed to prop herself up against the wall. No matter what the reason, the sudden appearance of a giant, disembodied hand holding an airbrush and the subsequent emasculation of her traveling companion Reggie Rigel has at the very least caused a spontaneous spasmodic reaction in her forearms, forcing her to involuntarily both slap and choke herself.

Finally, rare depictions of relative dominance in women in sci-fi:

March 1958's issue of The Original Science Fiction is the best of the bunch, not only forgoing the usual lost-in-space scenery but skillfully using the sci-fi palette of green to stunning effect. From the (possibly) alien hieroglyphics in the background, the glowing jewel in the hand of the statue, (or maybe a giant) and the way that glow plays off the heroine's clothing, tinting as much of her tunic as is exposed to the light. The detailing, while sparse and particular, also plays off of the character; the triangular accents on her clothing, the way her top drapes and billows along her arms, the miniaturized rebreather around her neck, (another forward-thinking hallmark; as technology progresses, everything gets smaller and smaller) the antenna array of the communicator slung on her back, and the most telling piece of equipment, her compact camera. What does the camera tell us? Look at her face; bright, intelligent eyes, a strong jawline, and a practical but still feminine haircut. The plucky protagonist portrayed here can be none other than Lois Lane...OF THE FUTURE...

Lastly, Imagination from August 1955 shows a woman of the future (1990, according to her plates) giving what for to some alien slag who apparently won his driving license in a raffle, given the traffic signage and the state (or lack thereof) of Uncle Marty's conveyance. It looks like Polly Pluto's Terraplane suffered little to no damage in the accident, if there even was one; it's even more difficult to puzzle out the happenings with this one, given the awkward posing of the compositional elements. For instance, why is Marty sitting on the ground with only a whitewall and a fractured steering wheel to his name? Where's the rest of his shitkicker? Did he even rear-end Polly? Or was Polly just crossing the street to her own hot rod when she encountered Marty coming at her from the wrong direction? One gets the feeling that once cover artist Harold McCauley finished detailing out Polly's capri pants, (OF THE FUTURE) strappy mules, and antigravity bustier, (dig the beaded Baker Boy beret, too) perhaps he felt the best part of the cover had already been completed, and just left the rest to his apprentice to flesh out, cluelessly.

Regardless of the source, the magic of one era is almost always doomed to the dustbin of absurdity in the next. Don't believe it? Wait a decade or two and see what gets reflected, ironically or otherwise, in popular culture. Most likely it's going to be something that helped to define a previous generation.

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A Trip To The Moon On Adamantine Wings.

2010-02-13T23:14:00.001-08:00

At what point does science fiction cease to be fantastic and revert back into regular, everyday, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, off-the-rack literature? Like most questions concerning the former genre, it's difficult to pinpoint an actual line in the sand due to the elasticity of the very definition of science fiction. As mentioned countless times in previous episodes, a lot of science fiction is, unfortunately, window dressing: exotic locales, alien co-stars, theoretical technology, supernatural plot devices, and excessive incidents of deus ex machina in the place of conflict resolution. Strip all these features away, and the core story is unlikely to be very different from the tales told by supposedly less "visionary" writers; but it only takes a spoonful of any or more of the aforementioned elements to somehow legitimize it again.

One of the more notorious exploitations of this loophole is when the old Sci-Fi Channel (now refitted as the ludicrous SyFy) used to screen Field Of Dreams; the logic being that since the movie had ghosts in it, it was technically a fantasy, and therefore fit into the purview of the network's programming genre. Even if you bought into this rationalization, the bullshit was still clearly visible, even underneath the other layers of the film; but how do we quantify that bullshit? How much more of the supernatural themes would have been required to push Field Of Dreams from a warm-and-fuzzy, dead-daddy-issues, baseball-as-the-spirit-of-middle-America pseudodrama into a true fantasy? We can't say; not because something as amorphous as defining a genre can't be quantified, but rather because each individual audience member is going to feel they can quantify such a thing, and everyone is going to have wildly varying tolerances.

Is Field Of Dreams a ghost story? Not in Your Humble Narrator's opinion, and not just because the ghosts aren't the archetypal restless spirits of Hammer filmography fame, but also because they aren't the core of the story; baseball is. It's more accurate to call it a baseball story with ghosts than a ghost story with baseball. But on the other hand, five fingers; without the baseball-playing ghosts, what's left of the story to tell? The ghosts, while not the core of the story, are certainly a trigger for the plot; the 1919 White Sox, trapped in Puragtory for human sins they committed on Earth, find a way to exist, if only fleetingly, on the Prime Material Plane and play the game they love unencumbered by surface world economic constraints. That's the real plot; everything else that happens around them in the real world is just noise.

Still, the overarching conundrum remains, as it has before, that there is no real definitive definition of science fiction; or any literary genre for that matter. What we do know is this, and it's probably more important than ever to reiterate this now in the new millennial age of mashed-up styles and genres, and this certainly counts towards this series of shaping definitions to fit any given situation: science fiction is to fantasy what reggae is to ska. That is to say, it's a common misconception that ska and rocksteady music spun off of the supercategory of reggae music, when in fact the opposite is true. Same thing with sci-fi and fantasy, and by extension, horror; all three genres are technically fantasy as they attempt to chronicle happenings that logically should only occur in dreams or fancies and not in the real world we perceive around us on a daily basis. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that a clearly discernible gap appeared between "traditional" fantasy and fantasy more heavily influenced by burgeoning technology; with the latter being eventually relabeled science fiction to more accurately reflect its skew.

In any case, as dear as "science fantasy" is to so many hearts, (it's one of the few things that unites the usually acrimonious factions of Geek, Nerd, and Dork) it still suffers from the core failing that it originates from the human mind, a uniquely flawed organic computer that produced consistently inconsistent results even from the same source. Factor in the repulsing factors of rabid fandom and anal retentive completists, and you have something akin to the properties of a handmade pastry or a small-batch brew. There will always be natural impurities from one crafter to another, which is part of the appeal; it's the differences between worlds that keep us engaged.

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Too Much Sugar Is Never Enough.

2010-02-12T02:30:00.001-08:00

Regular readers will no doubt be aware the role that cup-sized baked confectioneries played during the bulk of last year. That phase is over, as Your Humble Narrator has apparently garnered enough good and bad experience in the kitchen to obsolesce oneself from the realm of handheld sponge cakes and advance into culinary fields more suited to challenge my burgeoning skillset.

_{Espresso chip oatmeal cookies, from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.}

Admittedly, while baking is a bit of a science, it isn't rocket science, and anyone who whinges that they can't bake is more often than not a victim of circumstance than a model of incompetence. In a year of baking cupcakes, I've learned that the mistakes made when throwing batter into an oven doesn't yield quite the results expected can be either viewed as flat failures, or, more constructively, as ammunition to be used against the next project, or even the same project reiterated.

_{Left: Macadamia ginger drop cookies. Right: Cowboy cookies: oatmeal, coconut, pecans, and chocolate chips. Both recipes from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.}

One of the more common questions I get as an amateur cook is whether or not I come up with my own recipes, and the answer is both yes and no. Like everything else in the post-postmodern world, the line between clever innovation and creative originality is a thin one to split, and the issue of intellectual property is never so wibbly as when you deal with something as amorphous as a recipe for a dish. (the unwritten rule is that if you change three significant parts of a recipe, ["significant' meaning not piddly-ass shit like baking powder or salt and pepper or cornstarch] you're pretty much in the clear for calling it an original recipe) That said, I've almost never come up with a recipe on my own, just modified existing recipes, usually with a three-stage system. The first two times, I make the recipe by the book; once as a dry run to ensure everything works as the original author intended, and then again to make sure the first time wasn't just dumb luck. The third time is my chance to make the recipe my own.

_{Raw-style frozen cookie dough drops, from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.}

Almost disappointingly, making the transition from cupcakes to cookies has been relatively free of any boners or outright catastrophes. Part of the reason for this is the same reason why I stopped blogging for a couple months; it just wasn't blogging, I stopping doing anything of any real import, including baking, in favor of doing nothing of any import. The interval between baking sessions proved extensive enough to apparently either reset my inherent skills or embed my existing experience into sheer muscle memory, because to date, all the above batches have yielded above average to excellent results. If there was a low point in the past few weeks, it was when the sweeper on my #20 disher got bent out of true after cramming the cup too full of pasty raw dough.

Also, if there is one thing that links all baking genres together, it's this: an irrational fetish with chocolate. This is nothing new, and not an issue that's going to go away or fix itself anytime soon, but it's a notable annoyance to see that even when making a lateral change in projects, certain common elements can conspire to keep you doing the same thing you were before.

Still tastes pretty good, though.

Related: fresh eyes on veganism from Ruby.

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People Change, Spaceships Stay The Same.

2010-02-09T04:25:00.001-08:00

While Your Humble Narrator purports to be a borderline-rabid fan of all things science fiction, a cursory once-over of my reading list might give one pause as to the veracity of that claim. Aside from the inordinate number of single-issue comic books, graphic novel collections, historical biographies, vegan cookbooks, and paperbacks acquired purely for their cover art, you're unlikely to find any real "classics" of the genre, either on display or credited on a verbal checklist. The problem is, first of all, that the criteria for a science fiction classic are, or at least should be, divergently different from what qualifies a garden-variety piece of literature as a candidate for a position on a list of must-read-books-before-you-shed-your-crude-corporeal-shell. This problem is compounded by the fact that there is no real system for vetting a work as having literary merit, (other than overall quality, grammar, themes, depth of storytelling, etc.) and if there is one, it remains constantly vulnerable to challenges and interpretations from countless populations of readers, both "professional" and otherwise.

_{The U.K. cover of Blish's philosophical conundrum; the U.S. version has a priest standing next to a dinosaur holding a chalice in its claws.}

_{John Berkey's sublime cover art for the otherwise so-so Derelict is fraught with slightly silly peril.}

Not to mention the final indignity: despite a full century of uninterrupted publishing of the genre, a burgeoning range of themes in motion pictures and television, and the recent rise in respect for geeks and nerds, (most likely to read and/or write within the genre) science fiction still carries the stigma of being written for a second-class audience; children, aimless dreamers, and future sci-fi authors. Science fiction is to literature what pop music is to classical.

Why and how did the genre take on this particular scarlet letter? Confusion can be credited to a certain extent; the confusion over what parts of a piece of literature are judged, in addition to the work as a whole. Certainly any capable writer can fashion earnest, believable characters and wring pathos, ambiguity, and drama out of them; the question is that are the abilities of the writer and the effect of the writing somehow diminished by the locale, by the plot conceits, by any of the other little trappings of existence that bring a story to life? There is no shortage of anguish, introspection, and secrets in Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap Into Conflict series, but does setting it in deep space exclude it from being considered a great work of writing? Both film versions of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris deal with issues that can only realistically be addressed under the mantle of science fiction, lest it become just a ghost story; but does the stressor of an alien intelligence make the story any less evocative? Frank Herbert's original Dune (despite being somewhat diluted by Kevin J. Anderson's remarkable ability to homogenize any genre or franchise he touches) has endured as a retelling of the classic Messiah story; but is the idea of earthborn divinity made silly by transplanting it onto an alien planet?

_{The disconnect between sleek starfighter and spindly utilitarian space probes is stark.}

_{Silver, unmarked, and sporting razor-sharp edges, the rocket transports of the 1950's were a paradigm that took decades to shake off.}

It can be said that on the one hand, science fiction is just "normal" writing dressed up with starships and time machines and bug-eyed aliens. But on the other hand, five fingers; what is literature but science fiction with all the geegaws and whosiwhatsits and thingamajiggers taken out? And on the third hand, six pseudopods: does the genre really need formal legitimization? Isn't thousands of writers and millions of readers justification enough for another century of envelope-pushing, pigeonhole-denying, classification-buggering storytelling? If there was a singular definition of literary merit, and a work of science fiction met it, would it still be a part of the milieu it was spawned from?

Of course it would be. It's the sentimentality that just gets everything bogged down. The story's the thing, not the place.

⎋

Record Scratchin' Can Lead To Head Bashin'.

2009-11-29T20:29:00.001-08:00

Inside CD Alley, a new and used record store in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina:

It's literally a hole in the wall; if you walk too quickly along Market Street by the Cape Fear waterfront, you can breeze right past it.

Inside, it becomes gradually but obviously apparent that the building space was not originally a record store. Open doorways are shuttered by mildewy curtains, an annexed room in the rear of the shop opens into starkly contrasting flooring, and everywhere are fixtures left over from whatever proprietor evacuated previously. A jerry-rigged speaker system plays a piece of lo-fi no-wave from the right-hand side of the store, while a creaky spoken-word monologue drones out of the other. The walls are papered with promotional posters, postcards, and hand-lettered signs; which is all garnished with graffiti from patrons, smart-ass commentary from floor staff, and missing corners. The single available bench is repaired with a tactfully-placed portion of duct tape. The t-shirts only come in black. Everything is covered with a thin molecular layer of invisible but tactile dirt.

It's everything a proper record shop should be.

Thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing networks, a retroactive interest in niche musical subgenres, and a general glut of Other Shit to do; Your Humble Narrator hasn't bought an honest-to-Dog piece of physical media since the final fire sale at Alma Mater. Which is not to say that I've been deprived of a world of music, just that the little part I occupy is a mite isolated. I know who T-Pain and Fall Out Boy and Lady Gaga are, I just choose to listen to Dolly Mixture and U-Roy and People Like Us instead.

It was once that radio was truly the voice of a young America, or at least the guiding star for young Americans, an aural road map to show the way to the Cool, the Hip, the Current; all the states of belonging that we crave as impressionable clay figures. Radio tells us what's Number One, radio tells us what's going to be Number One next, radio is our GPS through the jungle of Pop/Rock/Soul.

But what now? Now where do we go? What Ranger do we follow?

⎋

Pulp For The Soul.

2009-11-05T20:18:00.001-08:00

In the years since Your Humble Narrator stopped collecting ~~comic books~~ graphic novels in earnest and now, a lot of changes have taken place, some good, some bad, some ridiculous, but mostly in the way of infrastructure; the general mechanics of how these individual imaginary universes work has more or less stayed the same. Characters come and go and come back, but not a whole lot of intrinsic change takes place; paper gets glossier, colors and inks graduate from analog to digital, and costumes more closely resemble mufti than disguises, but if not for cosmetic changes, it's more or less the same as it was left.

That is, completely and insufferably silly.

Which doesn't preclude foregoing the recent twenty-five-cent sale our local used bookstore had on their overstock:

It was sheer luck to capture the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight's initial run. Unlike the majority of titles that were available at the time, Alpha Flight distinguished itself with stories that focused on a single character at a time; everyone appears as a team only twice, in the premiere issue and issue #12. This might have weakened any other title, if not for John Byrne's superb pencilling and evocative storytelling that takes pains to relate the characters to their Canadian homeland.

Issue six, "Snowblind," is a highlight in the first series with a unique presentation. When Snowbird faces off against the resurrected nature spirit Kolomaq, her foe conjures up a blizzard to place her at a disadvantage. The entire middle half of the issue is all but bereft of art; just panel after panel of white backdrop broken with speech and thought balloons and action phoneticals. Byrne even manages to insert the old joke about a polar bear in a snowstorm.

Another more recent series that only ran for a dozen issues was Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman. By treating Kal-El as a human with a very heavy crown on his head, and less like an alien god, Morrison is able to accomplish what a lot of reboots and retcons have failed at in the past; tell fresh, engaging stories with venerable, established characters and situations. Frank Quitely's exquisite pencils (reminiscent of work from Enki Bilal and Moebius) emphasize the everyday imperfections possessed by everyone, but especially with the elements normally associated with the Man Of Steel: his drooping forelock, his red underpants, the sheer beefy bulk of his physique.

In order to reconcile a convoluted continuity and consolidate their bloated character roster, DC concocted the Crisis on Infinite Earths (almost always preceded in canon with "so-called") for their 50th anniversary. While the merging of the multiverse would ultimately be undone in the following years, the Crisis itself spawned a bunch of reboots for almost every major player, effectively ending the Silver Age and ushering in the Modern Age. George Pérez, one of the co-writers for Crisis, dominated the scene for the better part of the 1980s, producing memorable covers for Wonder Woman's second run, among several hundred others.

Not quite as ornate or lifelike, but equally skilled in distinct and consistent characterizations, is Walt Simonson, who wrote and drew a huge chunk of The Mighty Thor's initial run. His blocky yet detailed style follows the basic ideals of forced perspective; the larger the picture needed, the more intricate it becomes, and vice versa; the smaller or more far away, the less distinct the features are.

(Fun fact: Walt Simonson is married to Louise Simonson, writer of countless New Mutants and X-Factor strories [Apocalypse was one of her better ideas] and creator of cult favorite Power Pack.)

For Thor #337, 338, and 339, they introduced one of the queerest characters in the Marvel rogues gallery, Beta Ray Bill. Bill (later Beta Ray Thor) was an alien cyborg who apparently had sufficient valor, intestinal fortitude, and upper body strength to hold aloft Thor's hammer Mjolnir, which transmogrified him into a doppelgänger of the thunder god, with all the rights and powers therewith.

No matter how fervently any demographic slavers after their popular culture of choice, there always comes a statute of limitations when the cool factor runs out, which usually coincides at around the ten-year mark for the convenience of history. For some reason, the events of the 1970s form a middle ground from which more marginally acceptable materials spin away from, both into the past and the future. Therefore, the 1960s and 1980s were both hipper than the 1970s, but the 1950s and 1990s were superior to both, etc.

Why Marvel decided the 1970s was a ripe time for a World War II revival in comicdom remains a mystery, just like the resurgence of classic rock in the 1980s or the dominance of franchise reboots in the 2000s. Invaders #17 not only features Warrior Woman (an obvious homage to grindhouse favorite Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS) but a cameo by Der Fuehrer himself, which highlights one of the basic failings of comic book storytelling: the general unwillingness of writers to fully integrate the actions of their characters into the larger events of history. Superman fought in WWII as well, but closer examination of his actions reveals that his "service" was limited to more symbolic activities designed to boost morale and bolster the American fighting spirit; he never took part in any documented campaigns against Fortress Europe.

When you've been writing and drawing stories of radioactive freaks and alien vigilantes for fifty, sixty, seventy years, the make-believe alternate history you create can get a little out of control. Marvel realized that with their Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but DC did the idea one better with their Who's Who series. Marvel has always been the more left-brain-oriented of the major comic houses, and DC has always played more fast and loose with logic. Both encyclopedias featured wraparound cover art and CIA-esque dossiers on major and minor denizens, but Who's Who mixed it up with original masthead title art instead of a standardized font and action shots instead of Michaelangelo-esque full-body poses of each character.

Maybe ~~comic books~~ graphic novels don't fall into any of the major food groups of literature; novels, short stories, or poetry. Maybe they exist outside the expected territories, like comets or daywalking vampires or late-model sedans with government plates. Maybe also then they provide a different kind of cultural nutrition than their text-only forefathers or their celluloid and video contemporaries.

Or maybe they really are just funnybooks to distract us from the real world, if only for a few minutes at a time.

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In The Future, We Will All Be Assholes.

2009-10-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

ALL EARTH CREATURES ARE COMPELLED TO DON JUMPSUITS UNDER PAIN OF FACE MELTING

HEM DEELY BOPPER CHARMS AND EMPLOYMENT OF STEPIN FETCHIT BOTS OPTIONAL

IN THE PRESENCE OF DASHING SPACE OFFICERS WOMEN SPONTANEOUSLY LOSE THE ABILITY TO STAND UPRIGHT

GET OFF MY PLANET YOU DAMN KIDS

O RLY

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When Jumpsuits Ruled The World.

2009-06-25T18:51:00.001-07:00

Even hot snots like J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer started out as cold boogers like everyone else before they got dumb and lucky enough to get picked up at random by a publishing house willing to take a chance on an untested formula. But in the years before this post-postmodern age of the pulp author as media darling, writers of sci-fi and fantasy had to cut their teeth in the pages of periodicals before even being considered seriously for regular publication. And even once the stars aligned sufficiently to generate such circumstances, the results were often campy, cheesy, and pandering to the lowest common (and most likely to pay) denominator.

Still, it's refreshing to know that the genre we know now matured so fruitfully from such humble beginnings.

Murray Leinster wrote stories between 1916 and 1969 and, as all decent renaissance men of the time were seemingly able to do, naturally transitioned first from mysteries to westerns, and then from there to science fiction.

Space Platform sports all the hallmarks of post-WWII can-do industrialism, it just gets the physics wrong. Of course we know now that it's potentially more feasible to build a space station in orbit, so seeing it half-built and earthbound on the cover comes across as a little off. Plus, what are those two stevedores doing in the foreground, fighting or dancing? Why don't you buy the poor guy a drink at least?

Space Tug is the companion to Space Platform, and the dozen years inbetween publication dates shows in the style of the art. While Space Platform's Pocket cover could have been copied directly from a Soviet propaganda poster promoting the rewards of labor, Space Tug's cover is a primary color nightmare. Just the segmented, piecey look of the astrodude's jetpack and the lunar lander with a paint job that wouldn't look out of place in the New York subway makes the whole landscape look more like a LEGO diorama than the Moon's surface.

The stylistic elements used for the cover art for Operation: Outer Space almost look modern with their retro-futuristics. Space suits bulky enough to hold pressure, but not so utilitarian to go without Star Trek-esque ranking colors and pseudo-bondage silver constraints as accents. Glowing pocket fusion reactors (that might look familiar to Stargate SG-1 fans) hooked up to the impractically clunky whosiwhatsit the protagonist in red is fiddling with. The only dead giveaways are the needlenose rocket parked in the crater over yonder and the flying saucers raining hot death down on the poor dopes below.

Andre Norton was an ridiculously prolific writer, equally skilled with fantasy as with science fiction, producing stories and novels for almost 70 straight years. This lifelong achievement is only bettered by the fact that Andre Norton is the pen name of Alice Mary Norton. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as hard as it is for a woman to succeed in what is essentially a man's world, it's multiples more difficult in a niche, boy's-club genre like science fiction.

Most of the covers published for Norton's work in the 1950s conforms to the romantic, space-opera, function-follow-form look of the day. Plague Ship has dudes in floppy jumpsuits with raygun holsters and a rocket that looks like a tampon, The Last Planet features a cute-but-probably-psychopathic robot and more dudes in jumpsuits with raygun holsters, and even though the dude on the cover of The Stars Are Ours! is armed with a refreshing tonic for his recently-thawed cryo-date instead of a raygun, he is in a jumpsuit.

What did we miss here? Why didn't the jumpsuit ever catch on as an Earthbound fad in the half-century since they started appearing on every asshole who wanted to ride a hot rod into space? No doubt the hassle of having to disrobe almost completely during visits to the lavatory had something to do with it. It's only a matter of time before people get over their squickiness and accept the personal catheter as just another modern convenience. Then watch out for the new wave of pret-a-porter as jumpsuits fly off the racks.

Poul Anderson, another grand master who helped to shape the genre, also had the mixed fortune of writing during the golden age of science fiction and rising through the ranks. Problem is, you'd never know from some of the art that (dis)graced his early books that he was one of the greater steerers of the genre.

While the font used for Orbit Unlimited recalls the stencils used for old-timey war time cargo crates, the rest of the action on the cover suggests a more jerry-rigged operation, if you can even call it that. Are the dudes in space suits in trouble, other than the fact that they're suspended in a vacuum with only thin tethers keeping them from spiraling away into the abyss? It almost looks like they're recovering from a recent space-skiiing wipeout, or trying to build a pup tent in space, or, I dunno, fishing for space carp?

The annoyance continues with The Trouble Twisters. Not only is the cover tinted a lovely shade of jaundice, it supports the obnoxious faux- abstract style that has wrecked the impetus to read countless of presumably perfectly inoffensive books. There's a recognizable sliver of a lunar surface at the bottom, the object hurtling along in the upper left is probably an asteroid, and the thing on the right is maybe an alien garbage scow or something. But what the frick is that monstrosity in the middle, some kind of schizophrenic Martian World Trade Center?

The Enemy Stars is the least objectionable of the bunch, with a pleasing combination of niche triggers bound to press a few fanboys' buttons: a decently populated starfield, a looming cerulean planetoid, and a trio of futurenauts making their way doggedly across a presumably alien wasteland towards the serviceable technology clumped on the horizon.

But why are they nude?

...

Next time: the cheaper the cheese, the fancier the flight.

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Sex Smells Like A Library.

2009-06-01T18:36:00.001-07:00

Despite the depressing fact that the audience for science fiction is predominantly male, there's only so many readers you can capture with artwork featuring rockets, hulking aliens, and Martian palaces. While some more progressive publishers were using nudity to sell more books even as the 50s faded. most of the bigger houses didn't jump on the bandwagon until after the Summer of Love, and even then it was overwhelmingly female, to appeal to the fringes of the genre's fanboy base. Obscenity laws vary from community to community, so one cover's peek-a-boo may have been tantamount to full frontal depending on which bookstore stocked them. In any case, the amount of flesh exposed and the eroticism exhibited was toyed with in countless different iterations, primarily to appeal to the differing turn-on thresholds of the audience, but also in a lesser sense to push the boundaries of modern art.

The Dreaming Earth has a lot of the sci-fi prerequisites; the pre-dusk blue of the backdrop, alien green highlights, lens-flare-sized circles-stars, a rouge planetoid, and spaceships that look like circumcised swizzle sticks. The only thing that's out of place is the topless mannequin lording over the whole scene, and even that makes sense once you get a load of the teaser copy on the back cover: "A new breed of men and women - twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of 'happy dreams.'"

Robert Heinlein managed to cover everything from colonization to existentialism and keep it all in the scope of legit science fiction. The odd segmented woman on the cover of Methuselah's Children is already halfway to resembling a robot, but she's still organic enough to take place in an Ouroboros triad of mother, daughter, and granddaughter, all complete with matching sets of hippie beads. Don't overlook the silhouette of another huge bosom behind them all, the vagina-pink background, and the scattering of posies that mirror the shirt-buttom breasts of the family.

While One Million Tomorrows written about a immortal, virile man in an immortal, sterile future society, the cover art is about as erotic as a Mondrian painting. Even though it's more abstract than the Heinlein cover, it still manages to portray a similar three-member family. (Squint and you can make out the superimposed image of an alien-looking fetus) We assume the figure on the left is female from the crude breasts, but what are we to make of the combined imagery of a heart (or maybe a breastplate) and a cross? (no coincidence that it's over her crotch; a not-so-subtle insinuation of a chastity belt)

The piecemeal painting style for the cover of Tiltangle is nicely reminiscent of NASA's conceptual art of the time, and the nudity of the frozen women is tastefully occluded, but it still does little to hide the fact that the dude in the pressure suit is still strolling through a museum of women in bondage. They may not be restrained by straps or ropes or chains, but they can't move all the same, and they're still on display for any wandering fanboy to come along and ogle them. Objectification's the same almost everywhere you go.

A good example of "Satanic nudity," the woman on the cover of The Curse Of Rathlaw, while striking the archetypal nude model pose still used today to accentuate all the "important" parts; legs spread, back arched, chest thrust out; she hovers over the seemingly oblivious ram-horned daemon, wields a cruel-looking blade, and even appears to be standing ankle-deep in the background's dark territory. Despite her voguing, the nudity comes across as less exploitative than other covers and more alluring; additional care was taken to delineate surrounding body areas; her six-pack abs, the Todd McFarlane-like swoop of her hair, even her tan lines.

The cover for The Far-Out People is the kind of art that tries to use a level of way-out abstraction sufficient to muddle the delineation between clothed and nude, while at the same time exuding enough rough-hewn eroticism to generate some allure. The pinks and segments from the Heinlein cover are repurposed, used here to suggest a more human-like tone of the skin and softer muscle lines. And while the central female figure is clearly naked, the artist gets around the idea of full frontal nudity by giving her the modesty of a stringless necklace of luminescent baubles, a ploy used time and again to project the naughtiness of an unclothed body while strategically covering the naughtiest bits.

The art for Witch Queen Of Lochlann uses both color and shadow to suggest body lines; the female figure sports the usual pink skin, which darkens into red to define the downswing of her breasts. Even further south, the dark shadow cast onto her left thigh decays upwards into tiny little tendrils, giving the illusion of pubic hair peeking out into the murky light. Why she's wielding a truncheon in the nude while the requisite buffed blonde dude has both a sword and pants might just be more subtle female suppression imagery; on the other hand, there are sharks flying around as well...

The Sleep Eaters is an oddity in science fiction book covers primarily because it eschews the usual blues and greens for shades of violet against a white void. A single red planet loiters in the corner, tiny eyeball-shaped flying saucers flit about, and the clouds form an evil-looking face in the upper left-hand corner. The nudity itself is rare and unique in that not only is the nude figure male instead of female, but he's positioned so that his junk is facing the audience. Still, in adherence to unwritten rules about exposed genitalia, John's left leg is bent just so to create enough shadow to obscure...a crotch smoother than a Ken doll's?

Of this current bunch of thrift store scores, The Reassembled Man is the most misogynistic in both content and cover art. The back cover boasts a protagonist who is "stronger, healthier, and with a sexual appetite and promised lifespan greater than anyone else on earth." The art shows fully nude women scrabbling up the length of an old man's tree-trunk hand and fighting each other, presumably for dibs on the main character's privates, in a weird, fetishistic twist on King of the Mountain. The art isn't bad, but it does have the look of the kind of porn a Mad magazine staff artist might make in his spare time.

...

In all its vague and schizophrenic definitions and subgenres, science fiction often takes advantage of its reputation as substandard literature to explore avenues of creativity that aren't always practical for mainstream novels. If writers can explore beyond universally accepted norms for technology, human societies, and the meadows of the mind, certainly sexuality in all its conceived and imagined forms is also fair game. The problem is recognizing that sex is not always connected with the exploitation of the human form, and that one porny book cover does not necessarily a sexy story make.

⎋

Judge A Book.

2009-05-20T19:52:00.001-07:00

There's an unwritten rule when it comes to reggae records; the quality of the music is inversely proportional to the quality of the art on the dust jacket. The crappier the cover, the better the album is going to sound.

Turning that axiom sideways can be used as X-ray glasses on science fiction book covers. Although the returns are unlikely to be as black-and-white as the pencil and ink art for a piece of Peter Tosh vinyl, and certainly the subject of a sci-fi paperback's front cover is just as certain to be at most incidentally related to the content of the book itself, there are some generalizations that can be gleaned from recurring themes and motifs that appear the most frequently in cover art.

Here are just a few that will pop out at you at the bookstore, presented in a completely subjective and arbitrary ascending order of quality:

Circles/spheres: inter- and extraplanetary exploration, first contact, etc.
Rockets/skylines: technology, progress, outer space manifest destiny, etc.
Naked/half-naked people: subjugation of women, witchcraft, chemical sexual revolutions, etc.; (female) out-of-body experiences, telepresence, post-atomic savagery, etc.; (male) body possession, mass population uprising, etc. (both)
Dudes with guns: zombie apocalypse, Allan Quatermain-esque buccaneering, underground resistance against alien overlords, etc.
Abstract/avant-garde: telepathy, mind control, other psionic crap, etc.

And so on. Let's take a look at some examples:

If you ignore the dumpy-looking assholenaut in his saggy-diaper pressure suit and bucket helmet, the backdrop for The Tomorrow People is pretty stunning. The oversized Venn diagram of intersecting planet boundaries, set against the foreboding mystery of an angry-volcano-colored starfield. Pity the synopsis sounds like the source material for Species 2: "Johnny didn't know what it was that made Mars a death-trap...and he didn't know that he'd brought it back with him!"

The stylized starburst of The Stars Are Too High almost immediately bring to mind the classic solar symbol, or perhaps an airborne explosion. Looking at the startled figure in the foreground, one can almost imagine the circle's rays forming its own limbs and shambling Frankenstein's-monster-style towards the Earth representative with alien menace. But, this one isn't about an invasion or a supernova; the antagonists are apparently rogue scientists who build their own UFO from spare parts.

Despite being crowded with extraneous text and abstract leanings, the colors used for Fifth Planet are refreshing, a nice break from the dour earth tones of some sci-fi covers, especially those that deal with alien worlds. The starfield in the background is especially striking, if you can even call it a starfield; a closer look reveals a clever use of broad brushstrokes and Jackson Pollack twirlings. However, as the abstract motif suggests, the story is less about celestial exploration than it is about body snatching aliens.

These next three are all from collections, which are always a good resource for homogenized, blanket-themed art:

There's a lot happening on the cover of Three Times Infinity: craggy black wasteland in the forefront, an intrepid silver-suited vanguard of cosmonauts bearing retro-futuristic standards, (or maybe golf clubs? "It's a long par four to Olympus Mons...") sleek rocket patrols darting overhead, a spooky orange haze occluding weird lights in the distance, and a domed alien metropolis, looking for all the world like a Martian Crystal Cathedral.

New Tales of Space and Time is no less dramatic, if somewhat fanciful: Skirting the broken edge of a dead moon, a Wernher von Braun-influenced rocket, firing on all cylinders, makes for a Gordian knot of a solar system, complete with conveniently delineated orbital lines.

The diorama laid out for Star Science Fiction Stories #3 is a little staid in comparison, but it still manages to feature some key icons in the realm of idealistic futurism: naked human, (or possibly Gort?) modern art stolen from The Martian Chronicles, some weird alien line drawings, (or maybe a Burning Man for ants?) the engorged black length of a squatting rocket, and glaring over it all, the baleful, bloodshot, boogity-boogity eye of Mars, complete with canals tracing its surface.

The phallus of the classical rocket ship is a strong indicator of quality in pulp science fiction; at least from a forward-thinking, progressive, final frontier state of mind, even if the science conjured up by the writers never really jived with reality. All three of these collections were published in the 1950s, which was a red-hot decade of burgeoning rocket technology for both the United States and the Soviet Union. The image of the rocket naturally became a point of national pride for both sides, representing innovation, tenacity, and fearlessness in the face of the greatest unknown, the borders beyond our atmosphere.

Barring the fact that they were essentially giant steel erections, they were also equivalent to the pioneers, cowboys, and horsemen of the previous generation's Zane Grey and other beloved western writers; boldly going into undiscovered country.

Finally, a few comparisons of style within reprints:

The 1970 printing of 1932's When Worlds Collide features an excellent juxtaposing of three hallmarks of science fiction cover art: circles, rockets, and naked bodies. The threatening fuschia of the encroaching rouge planets is also reflected in the flames below, presumably those of a ruined Earth. The rocket is colored gold, to represent salvation, the means of escape for the chosen few; while the nude masses of those left behind claw desperately for an aperture in the steel skin. Two out of three isn't bad; it's doubtful there's any human sacrifice or crazy alien sex in the pages of this early classic.

The redesigned 1973 cover (also for the 1933 sequel) by Stan Zagorski recalls a period of time during that unfortunately stigmatized decade where science fiction art, which was never really taken seriously until Star Wars, became downright childlike and goofy, reminiscent of similar reworkings of Mark Twain and other American folk authors, their tales transposed into freaky, jerky animations.

Still, the imagery remains powerful. The planet is cleaved in two by cosmic chain lightning, gushing bodily fluids and emanating death-knell gases, while the hapless survivors careen away under impulse power. The same images are recycled to an eerie effect for After Worlds Collide: bulbous rockets scout the surface of the Earthlings new home, the alien city is silhouetted in a ruby mist, and the Earth's corpse is seen tumbling through the sky.

Maybe you can't judge a book by its cover, but if the art convinces you into reading, it's obviously done its job.

Next time: primary colors, dudes with guns, and more nekkidness.

⎋

Pulp Addiction.

2009-05-16T14:39:00.001-07:00

Last week's thrift store scores:

The synopsis for Station In Space reads more like the mission statement of a Web 2.0 company: ""Outer space used to be a place for dreams - now it is a place for plans. It vitally concerns human beings." The cover art is nifty, though; especially how the timeline of mankind is laid out aircraft-recognition-card-style, from caveman to Renaissance astronomer to spaceman.

The cover for Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (infamously adapted into Soylent Green) looks more like a child's interpretation of the Galactic Senate from the Star Wars prequels, with a couple of dudes from the Carousel scene from Logan's Run getting vaporized in the forefront.

Not only does the cover of The Flying Saucer Gambit practice good truth in advertising by placing a big-ass flying saucer in the middle of the cover, but it attempts to transplant the spirit of old-timey sci-fi serials on other fronts. The series name gets a number and headlines above the title; the protagonist, Hannibal Fortune, suffers from both an unlikely name and the two-fisted reputation that goes along with it; and best (or perhaps worst) of all, it's a time travel story that takes place mostly in 1966.

H.G. Wells lived in a time when hot-air balloons were high tech, so it makes sense that he replicated it as the primary mode of travel in 1901's First Men In The Moon. The green tint of the cover is both appropriate and typical; when the sun rises on Wells' lunar surface, the atmosphere melts and all manner of alien greenery grow wild. On the other hand, the most common color used for science fiction novels is green, anyway.

With the haphazardly masculine typeface of the title, along with the hero's bomber jacket and M1 Garand rifle, loping away from cake-batter-like flames, Doomsday, 1999 pushes a lot of blood n' guts buttons. Unfortunately, we're also treated to this on the frontispiece:

Oh, great. More women under forcefields with their hands nailed to their foreheads, pining for their rescuing atomic-age commandos. Some things never change.

Despite its vague description, ("the story of a tremendous race for supremacy above the earth") the cover art for Dark Dominion is both dark and daunting, reminiscent of scenes from George Pal's Destination Moon; the rocket's huge footpads, the glowing community of engineers busying themselves with the undercarriage, and the come-hither purple and black starfield in the background.

Plus:

These two I actually intend to read. Burroughs' Mars cycle has always been bubbling on the back burner of my brain, but it took this recent spree into collecting compounded with an article in an old issue of Outré magazine to actually metabolize the thought into an action. The original plan was to ferret out some kind of omnibus collection of all eleven books in an effort to save time, but this notion turned out to be ill-thought. Burroughs apparently was fairly progressive with the series, buttoning up John Carter's adventures in the first three volumes, then dedicating later stories to supporting characters and innovative storytelling. So, unless you source your paperbacks from a discount warehouse or used bookshop, it may not be financially prudent to invest in the entire series of individual volumes if they constituted a contiguous narrative. But, since the core stories are housed in the initial trilogy, the configuration makes for a nice "try before you buy-in" setup.

My brother, who is a bigger sci-fi and fantasy phile than Your Humble Narrator, was a big fan of the Horseclans books back in the day.* At the time, I confused author and creator Robert Adams with Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian in 1932, and for a while I assumed the Horseclans stories to be in the same pulpy vein. Adams' books are apparently nothing of the sort, being more of a sci-fi-fantasy hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior world, with horses replacing cars and the body-stealing Witchmen instead of Lord Humungus' mohawked marauders.

A day on the cowch with a book is time well wasted.

*"The day" being the mid-to-late 1980s, or thereabouts.

⎋

The Spice Must Flow.

2009-05-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

In light of yesterday’s post, and also because no one demanded it, a transcription from 1998 or so on a related subject:

Despite having the most exclusive girls club in the planet, you can give the Spice Girls props for being moderately egalitarian as well. Condensed into five slightly chubby Cockneys, you get a telescoped gamut of individuals: Posh, the poor little rich girl; Ginger, the fierce feminist and 60s throwback; Baby, the I-don’t-wanna-grow-up pre-rebellion teenager and jailbait fetish; Sporty, the tomboy who played rugby and never wears a dress; and Scary, the paramilitary, quasi-lesbian, cross-pollinated “token black” who stands out more by making the other four look even whiter than British standards.

But this interpretation only crosses class lines. Ethnically, the Whitebread Girls seem pretty homogenized. No Asians, (Posh is passable in a pinch) no Latinas, (Scary is a mulatto) etc. But, seeing that world history is written in milk, this is hardly surprising and barely merits discussion. You might as well ask where Down’s Syndrome Spice is, or White Trash Spice, or Compton Spice, or Quadriplegic Spice, or Y Chromosome Spice.

Maybe it’s preferable (or just less offensive) to associate the individual Spice Girls with less obvious attributes, things that transcend such fleeting issues as race or social status. I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Dr. Bashir falls into a coma and retreats deep into his own mind. There he finds different aspects of his personality represented by other members of the station crew: Major Kira was his aggression, Odo his paranoia, Chief O’Brien is doubt, etc. This template could also be used for the Spice Girls: for example, Scary is the outspoken loudmouth, our aggression, our need to fight and be defensive. You could compare Scary to the id, the unconscious source of instinctual needs, of primal urges. She incorporates some elements from the reptilian brain concept of instant gratification; being so outspoken, as if she has to immediately say whatever is on her mind, lest it be lost in the ether. We become Scary when we release our inhibitions, when we drink too much and get belligerent. Scary is who makes you honk your car horn in gridlock.

Contrary to Scary Spice is Baby Spice. Immature and sweet, innocent and doe-eyed, Baby is our introspection, our suppressed infantism, our need to turn away and run, our ability for flight in the face of a fight. Baby is our inner desire to be vulnerable, to be taken care of.

Balancing Baby’s prepubescent eroticism is Ginger Spice’s blatant sexualization. Carrot-topped and vinyl-frocked, top heavy and long leggy, Ginger’s alternate nickname is Sexy Spice, logically because she’s the typical living embodiment of your sex drive, whether you’re male or female. She presents the female form in its extreme: shocking tresses, puffy lips, stems that go on for miles, a bubble-butt, and a barely restrained balcony you could do Shakespeare off of. This uninhibited form also reflects Carl Jung’s “anima” archetype, an individual’s true inner self, as compared to the self we project externally. Ginger is the “real me” we all brag about being: a pure, undiluted feminine character. But despite all her physical characteristics, Ginger is probably the most abstract of the personality analogues.

Trying to fully personify sex and everything associated with it is a task that poets and pornographers alike have attempted in the past, with varying degrees of success and failure. Because along with sex, you have lust and jealously and infidelity and The Romeo And Juliet Effect wherein love destroys all parties involved, (“See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, that Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.”) and thousands of other elements that make up this feeling, this urge, this itch we cannot help but scratch, this feral and spiritual activity that opens our pores and orifices, that turns our skin to water and makes our brains bloom like tulips. Ginger, being the eldest Spice Girl, also represents our maturity, our adulthood, and the completion of sexual transformation, from girl to woman. Ginger is the antithesis of Baby; Baby is all touchy-feely, Ginger is spiritual and attuned.

Of the two remaining wild cards, Sporty Spice is the most understood, standing out from the rest by her sheer ordinariness. She is the outward personality appearance, the mind’s center of gravity, a default factory setting. She is also your psyche’s ego, the mediator between instinct and reality. Where Scary (the id) and Baby (the superego) join to clash, Sporty intervenes and tempers the inner conflict with logic and reason. By being so plain in appearance, Sporty sets herself as a tabula rasa, the “blank slate” upon which the basest of emotions and behavior patterns are inscribed during our formative years. As a tomboy, she doesn’t fall into any “girly” archetype, and her sweatsuit wardrobe exudes a somewhat dykey air. This is the masculinity mixed in with every dose of femininity, her yang to Posh’s yin. And as yang, the masculine active principle exhibited in strength, is it any wonder than Sporty sports the most powerful voice in the group?

Yin to Sporty’s yang is Posh: dark-haired, dark-eyed, almost always clad in black, she is the Spice Girl who never smiles, (“Gives me dimples,” she claims) whose voice is barely heard or recognized on the records, who just seems to melt in and out of sight on stage and on video. To call Posh “evil” may be presumptuous, but the concept is not unjust. Post more closely resembles Jung’s “shadow” archetype, the part of our personality still rooted in bestiality, the aspects of the mind that remain closed and unexplored, the realm where our darkest and most primal feelings originate. No, Posh is not evil in the standard sense, she’s more like a fallen angel, landed on Earth to redeem herself, haunted by forgotten past deeds.

So, to recap:

Scary Spice = id
Baby Spice = superego
Ginger Spice = anima
Sporty Spice = ego/yang
Posh Spice = shadow/yin

IT MAKES SENSE SIR INDEED OMG CHEVRON SEVEN WILL NOT LOCK WTF

⎋

Dork Territory.

2009-05-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

If the internet, the world communications net, and other burgeoning new technologies are supposedly all part a great leveling system where everyone's voice is more or less equally heard and valid, how does one explain the war of elitism between the nerd, geek, and dork elite and the otherwise everyday civilians who would supplant the assumptive culture of the former groups?

Let's try to clear something up first; or rather, three things: the so-called "geek hierarchy" mentioned above.

A geek has been defined variously as "a person intensely interested in a particular field or hobby," "a peculiar or otherwise odd person perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things," and "a person who is interested in things that others are not interested in," among other dissimilar descriptions. While the wording and the meaning changes from one person's perspective to another, the underlying theme is that of a focus on a certain field, whether it be computer science, role-playing games, and anime, or global weather patterns, UFO conspiracies, and single malt whiskies.

A nerd can be known as "a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests," A person who, although having good technical or scientific skills, is introspective and generally introverted," and "a person who gains pleasure from amassing large quantities of knowledge." Overall, a nerd is an intellectual, collecting knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

The problem with these first two is that because their markers are so similar and shared, their use as labels can be maddeningly interchangeable. Geeks can be studiously obsessive, while nerds can be obsessively studious; both classes pursue their interests doggedly and passionately. Because of this overlap, it's possible for someone who claims to be a geek to also qualify for nerd status, and vice versa.

All this is fine and good, but once we get to the third leg of the triumvirate, a disparity is revealed. A majority of dork characteristics are overwhelmingly negative: "a quirky, silly and/or stupid, socially inept person," "a person who lacks friends and the social skills to properly communicate with others," "a person who is noted for their quirky personality and behavior rather than their interests or IQ," etc. The distinction for a dork is primarily that of behavior, not necessarily the intellect of the nerd or the obsessiveness of the geek.

Can we apply these roles to the traditional psychic apparatus? Let's try it!

The id makes up the mind's basic drives, focusing on selfishness, instant self-gratification, and the pleasure principle. The id is also the blood enemy of the superego.
The ego is the center of realistic ideals, seeking to mitigate the id's wants with practical, non-destructive results.
The superego makes up the conscience concerned with order, structure, and ideals, which makes it naturally opposed to the id.

So if the id is all "wantwantwant," who in the geek hierarchy would that be? The nerd, always hungry for knowledge? The two wouldn't seem to dovetail, what with the id's carnal desires and the nerd's measured gathering of facts. Archaically speaking, the geek is closer in relation to the id, if one uses the reference of a geek as a carnival performer who bites the heads off small animals. Realistically speaking, the focus and obsessiveness of the geek does indeed parallel the id's need for satisfaction, even if the geek's concentration is on niche subjects.

It makes sense then, and at the same time no sense, for the superego to be the nerd's analogue. Forgetting the feud between the id and superego for a moment, we can recall the similarities between the nerd and the geek, both pursuing their own fields of knowledge; except we can call the nerd's passion a "thirst" while the geek is more likely to "lust" after a subject.

That leaves the dork. A dork is a whale penis. No help there. But if the ego is the Concordant Opposition of the subconscious, the true neutral in the party, the go-between for transforming the harebrained idea into a business plan, then that more or less fits the dork as well.

Anyway, the point is that these terms - geek, nerd, dork - are simultaneously badges of honor and scarlet letters. And beyond their dictionary definitions, can be applied according to an arbitrary and universally disputed set of variables. If someone is smart enough to fix a computer, does that make them a geek or a nerd? If someone spends their time playing D&D solo adventures, are they a dork or a geek? If someone has both the mental capacity to memorize a large portion of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry and the willingness to do so for no other reason other than to do so, are they a nerd or a dork?

It's a tangle. But on the other hand, five fingers: it doesn't have to be a tangle. There doesn't have to be any inherent value placed upon geek culture or nerd society or the dork underground because the strata of content that comprises these lifestyles still belong to the rest of the world, just in markedly diminished markets. The moment a subculture's value reaches a level of mass that requires it to take on the elements of a possession, it becomes less of a grouping of cultural items and more of a commodity.

That is to say, if you can sell water in a bottle, you can sell a lifestyle that is, by definition, ostracizing.

And there's enough insular behavior in the world already.

Related: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

⎋

The Cranky Gourmand's Round.

2009-04-24T22:57:00.001-07:00

An article from the Wall Street Journal's drink columnist appeared yesterday, heralding the apparent meteoric fall of vodka from the approving regard of the bar-slumming. pinky-flapping, hipster-lush community of the twenty-first century. The first thing that went through Your Humble Narrator's ample, heaving, and not entirely unattractive gray matter upon glossing over this tawdry piece of yellow, reactionary, muckracking journalism was, "The Wall Street Journal has a drink columnist!?"

The second airborne notion to wing its way into Your Humble Narrator's excruciatingly clean ear canal and skim across the shimmering lakes of the superior sagittal sinus to light upon the brain's bloody CPU was, "A vodka gimlet sounds really good right about now."

I'm not a serious drinker. Which is not to say I don't take drinking seriously, because I really don't, at least not in the sense that I'm a cocktail Nazi, i.e. martinis should be made with gin and not vodka, margaritas should be made with lime juice and not sweet-and-sour mix, cuba libres should be made with Mexican Coke, etc. That is to say, I'm not a serious, fussy, foodie-style drinker, but I'm also not a flighty, idiot-toungued, I'll-have-what-she's-having kind of drinker. Truth be told, I'm not much of a drinker at all.

For the most part this is because I spend the majority of my waking hours alone, (as well as the unconscious ones) and I adhere to a strict principle that drinking alone is lame. It's one of the few tenets of solitude that's kept things on the straight and narrow for a while now, and it's also bled over into a learned appreciation of infrequent, pleasurable things. This is why I rarely drink, and even then in mixed company, and even then, it's usually not just a beer, because even the most rustic of microbrews still tastes like pee waiting to happen.

My brother introduced me to the vodka gimlet a while ago, and it soon endeared itself to me as a stealthy alternative to Pine-Sol-flavored gin & tonics and grody martinis. However, like all mixed drinks with three or fewer notes, it can be a little fussy to make, and that's where inferior iterations start to creep in.

A vodka gimlet at its simplest is vodka shaken with lime juice, but the weird twist is that, like the martini, the gimlet's earliest incarnations were made with gin, which is not surprising, seeing as vodka didn't become readily available outside of Europe until the 1950s. Whatever the top note spirit is is as unimportant as which to use in a martini, or whether the vodka should be Polish or Russian, or whether the whole mess should be stirred and not shaken out of fear of "bruising" the gin, at least in Your Humble Narrator's eyes, because Your Humble Narrator doesn't think much of martinis anyway and maybe the world would be a different wasteland of pop culture if Ian Fleming had instructed his soon-to-be-infamous protagonist to order a sidecar or a daiquirí or an Irish coffee or something instead of three ounces of watery rotgut that's spent the better part of half a century riding the coattails of an imaginary reputation.

Then again, maybe I just haven't met the right kind of gin.

Anyway, the point of contention for me with the gimlet is not the spirit, but where the lime comes from:

One of these has lime juice; the other contains nitroglycerine. Choose carefully.

Like all classic cocktails, the original recipe for the gimlet is lost to history, but it come about recently enough to require barkeeps to stock lime cordial as a middle note, and the most notable of lime cordials is Rose's. The trouble is that while Rose's may have originally been preserved and sweetened with sugar syrup, these days it's fortified with our old nemesis high fructose corn syrup.

What to do? Get off your bum and make your own lime cordial, that's what; or at least disassemble it into its individual components. Some barkeeps maintain the adage that Rose's is the ingredient responsible for creating the drink in the first place, and stick to it out of tradition. The problem with that, other than dealing with a freaky liquid GMO, is that Rose's, being a conglomerate product, locks the home barkeep into using everything it offers. I enjoy sweet drinks just as much as the next barfly, but I also like to have a bit of flexibility and an option to explore drinks with similar ingredients but different flavors, like a gimlet that maintains its citrus snap but isn't so sweet it coats the tongue:

Yummy. Prevents scurvy, too.

Fill an old-fashioned glass with ice. If you have a shaker, fill that too, then add two ounces of vodka and the juice of one lime. Shake gently, strain into the glass, and then...wait. This is the secret to enjoying a gimlet; letting it sit for a few minutes to allow the ice to melt a bit and dilute the mixture to mellow it out. Vodka is a pretty neutral-tasting spirit, (the word itself is a Russian diminutive of "water") but the lime juice and water do something to wake up its more secret notes, almost in the same way a gin & tonic that's been sitting around for a while starts to taste like Fresca.

When I drink, it's usually at a special time and/or place, so the drink I imbibe needs to be equally special, if only to help the whole vibe of the event sync up properly; a mint julep at a summer party, a shot of whiskey to toast an absent friend, a decent Gewürztraminer over a candle. Drinking is more than just a byproduct of socializing, it's a ritual of bonding and unification; when we toast each other, our glasses touch and we are briefly sharing the same vessel, something the ancient Greeks would practice at their symposium, from which would sprout all manner of participatory conversation.

So there is an end product to drinking other than calling Fred on the big white phone.

⎋

We Read With Our Eyes.

2009-04-20T21:10:00.000-07:00

[i.]

A few more examples of interestingly-designed pulp fiction cover art:

In addition to an absurdly excellent title, This World Is Taboo features the classic juxtaposition of a moonlike planetoid's gently curving hip set against the idealistically dense starfield that was prevalent in the 50s and 60s. (You can see carryover influences everywhere, from Universal's pre-conglomerate television logo to Disney's hackneyed but stylized The Black Hole) The image is graded, as most sci-fi is, pulp or otherwise, by the number of spaceships it manages to cram into the frame, like a zero-gravity used car lot.

Burroughs' Land Of Terror has cover art by fantasy master Frank Frazetta, and while the colors aren't very dynamic, the composition of the picture's individual elements is. From the forefront where the impossibly-chiseled young savage couple stand, there exist clearly delineated layers, each moving a little farther into the distance, past the grinning dinos and bored mammoths and horny sabretooths, until we hit the brick wall of the impassible mountain range choked in underground mist. The effect is decidedly three-dimensional.

The Long Loud Silence presents a dichotomy; the ragged, burned, desperate survivors of an atomic blast decked out in their Sunday rags, and the ramrod stiff, silver-skeined, advance guard of futuristic recovery efforts. The protagonist in the book is a hapless sap who sleeps through the holocaust, and the rad-suit jacketed heavy with the sloth-like mitts and crowd-pleasing rifle with fine walnut grain finish is no doubt a representative of the reactionary government's attempt to clean up their own mess. Notice how the goliath is shrouded in fire, amplifying his menace.

If it wasn't for the ridiculous chauvinism of the back cover's blurb, ("One man, Zachary Whaleman, a blond giant of incredible strength and intelligence, holds the balance of power!") the sheer cool beauty of The Guns Of Terra 10's blues would make it a complete package. Even as recently as 1970, flying saucers still loomed overhead, robots were still just Vegematics on stilts, and female characters still wore embarrassingly impractical environmental gear. But above our action-poised heroes and behind the pie pan-UFO is spread out the classic starfield, streaked with cerulean and speckled with paint-splatter clusters of light.

Speaking of robots, the scene portrayed on the cover of It Was The Day Of The Robot brings to mind past artists' impressions of H. G. Wells' Martian tripods from War Of The Worlds as they rolled over New Jersey, ignoring the efforts of army and militia alike. And even though over six decade separate Wells and the paperback on the far right, one would like to think that in that time, 20th century creative minds would have been able to come up with something at least as equally elegant and original as Wells' insectoid invaders, instead of just the de rigeur coffee can on legs.

Oh well.

[ii.]

A few divergent covers for Jack Vance books:

Vance is one of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors, if only because we was able to write both seemingly disparate genres equally well, and apparently with both hands, he was so copious in his output. Despite this, he never really emerged out from the shadow of sleepy cultism, never achieved the standard-bearer reputatation of Bradbury or Heinlein, the genre-smashing notoriety of Vonnegut or Dick, or the gravitas of elder statesmen like Tolkien or Herbert.

The Dying Earth is Vance's magnum opus, but the Australian edition at the far left looks like it belongs on the cover of the novelization of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids; "In a world ruled by man-eating dandelions..." The Eyes Of The Overworld, in contrast, pretty much sums up Vance's style in a tight visual: reasonably fanciful architecture set against a bleak wasteland. Just enough dystopian fantasy to keep the image from bleeding over into La Planète Sauvage territory.

Not quite sure what to make of Trullion: Alastor 2262 on the far right; the representatives from an alien flowerbed seem legit enough from a sci-fi point of view, but it's hard to focus when all you want to do is blurt, "HEY LADY YOU FORGOT YOUR PANTS"

Oh well.

[iii.]

And finally, a bonus:

Frontispiece art from the 1981 printing of the Dungeons & Dragons Expert rulebook, drawn by Bill Willingham, who did countless pieces for TSR before creating the Elementals comic in the 80s, the Fables series, and numerous one-off stories inbetween. (not to mention the odd bit of porn.)

Oh well.

⎋

The Cranky Gourmand Versus The Opium Fiends.

2009-04-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Vegan lemon poppy seed cupcakes:

AP flour, baker's sugar, baking powder, salt, lemon zest, poppy seeds, soymilk, ground flaxseed, lemon juice, canola oil.

Not bad. Pretty good, actually; if you compare how many cupcakes I leave the house with in the morning to how many I bring back in the afternoon. Fifteen to fifteen this time, not an unopiated eye in the house.

Actually, depending on who you ask, where you shop, and which science-as-entertainment show you watch, it either takes an unreasonable level of ingested poppy seeds or a not-too-terribly-unreasonable level of ingested poppy seeds in order for the average human to test positive for opiates. Take into account that most popular tests of this nature involve some manner of poppy seed delivery system, which is invariably the ubiquitous poppy seed bagel, which is as close as some people get to trafficking in Schedule II narcotics in their lifetimes.

Besides, it's not as if you can get a buzz or anything. Constipated is more like it, what with that amount of bread in your gut.

Fun fact: the practice of holding back prisoners' meals to only bread and water was less of an effort to reduce a person's social status than it was a method of torture. Limit yourself to only starches for a week and see how your bowels feel.

⎋

Nine Hundred And Ninety-Nine Words.

2009-04-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

[i.]

A sampling of Tower Records-themed postcards, circa 2000:

Click through for artist credits.

The best one is the one on the far ~~left~~ right, with the stilettos and the legs and the ai-yi-yi. Marketing pundits have lauded Tower for their iconic yellow-and-red plastic bags as a subversively viral campaign; even when the bags are trashed, stuffed into overflowing rubbish bins, flying around in tiny thermal vortexes, stuck to the bottom of platform shoes, their advertising power still isn't diminished a bit.

And back in the day, those things were everywhere.

[ii.]

Tofu scramble in Grandma's cast iron skillet:

Tofu, crimini mushrooms, grated carrot, garlic, turmeric, cumin, paprika, salt, nutritional yeast, olive oil, lemon juice, thyme.

[iii.]

A selection of used book shop scores:

All these are remarkable examples of what we would call "retro-futurism" today, and what was probably lagging just a little behind the cutting edge of the time. Phallic rockets, silver pressure suits, and bright accent colors abound, but so do interesting decorative designs, like the pseudo-fractals for the "On The Symb-Socket Circuit" cover, and sharp complementary colors like the Hallowe'en theme for "Beyond The Black Enigma" and the Xmas striping for "The Brain-Stealers." (which also features another hallmark of sci-fi cover art that would burgeon into the 60s and 70s, the strategically covered nude female form)

However, you can't beat the copy for "The Four Day Weekend" for hack and pulp fiction misogyny at its best: "What happens to a man when a woman is the boss even in the 21st Century?"

The hilarity continues on the back cover: "And into this incredible situation Charles Henry Hyde was thrust, with a shrew of a wife named Agnes who nagged like it was 1966..."

STOP IT YOU'RE KILLING ME

⎋

Nihil Lacrima Citius Arescit.

2009-03-31T19:43:00.001-07:00

When you feel this way, you don't want to do anything. You don't want to talk about it, you don't want to write about it, you don't want anyone else to know about it. On the other hand, when you feel this way, you want to keep it all to yourself, you don't want to risk jinxing it, you don't want to let your secret loose into the world.

So you got the worst of it from the worst side of the worst in your class. So they chased you off the grounds with hurled divots from the greens. They take so much pleasure in your pain, your displacement, your isolation.

But they're bloodless. They have no teeth, no lineage, no future. Their anger, their hate, their ignorance and stupidity; it can only evaporate under the heatlamps of their passion or eat them away from the inside out.

Either way, they won't remember you; they never do. Because you're small, because you're quiet, because you're insignificant. Because you look inside while radiating out, like a plant, like ivy, like an immortal bulb, like a Martian, like a flower.

All they can do is consume more than they produce. All they can do is think of themselves. They lean on others just to make themselves look taller, but they just end up looking lame and hobbled.

...

I'm sorry you had to walk home from school crying, feeling awkward and stupid because you had to keep walking but you couldn't stop crying. I'm sorry you felt worthless and low and wish you had never been born. I'm sorry you felt so angry with no way to release it except in tears, I'm sorry you were all alone, I'm sorry there was no one to hold you; I'm sorry I couldn't help you through your pain and your frustration and all the other sharp, confusing, unwelcome feelings.

But believe me, it gets better. It gets harder, too; but it gets better. You do have worth.

⎋

Moments.

2009-03-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

Force it, it's like a muscle. Like a muscle, it remembers. It remembers pain, it remembers growth, it remembers numbness, it remembers patterns, it remembers absence. It's like a muscle. Use it or lose it, it's like a muscle. Like a muscle, it forgets. It forgets paths, it forgets instructions, it forgets its own strength, it forgets trial, it forgets presence. It's like a muscle.

So put a ring on it. Flex the power. Stretch the muscle from its gray root to a pale extremity. Force it if it's not willing. Extract it if it won't extend. Deprive it of the same breath that powers your real muscles if it won't cooperate.

But the power, it is shared. It is yours to employ, but not yours to keep. It's a loaner, a gracious donation, a team effort. Which does not exclude coercion from your utility belt. There are worlds to revise, people to possess, years upon years of backdated files to parse. You need all the power you can wield, you need every sword in your quiver to swing at the cobwebs, you need every copper in your purse to bribe the guards at the border, you need every favor called in and cashed in, you need every magic- and skill-based modifier applied to your THAC0 roll.

Because it will only turn into cancer if it stays inside of you. Because it is the only way to transform a bodiless horror into a palpable beauty. Because everything exists in cycles, everything dies as slowly as it lives, because today's hot blood is tomorrow's cold ichor. Because nothing lasts forever, because tomorrow never knows, because yesterday is the ashes of cash.

So you build the power, so you follow the memory of muscle, so you map out the patterns of indestructible organic energy and weightless electromagnetic messages from the future and ten-ton ideas of carbon steel from the past. You force it, you make a sword with your pen, you make a shield with your scroll, you make a helm of your hood and a glaive of your breath and a wing of your will.

Because you don't want to die. Because anger is an energy, because balance is a lifting thermal, because passion is a tightrope. Because the world won't wait, because the world will take the seat closest to the exit, because the world expects payment on the first and fifteenth, because the world has cancer; a cancer of numbers, a cancer of stillborn ideas, a cancer of ice.

You do what you have to in the moment. The moment is all that matters, because the moment never lasts.

⎋

Ignition Keys For Tiny Time Machines.

2009-03-22T01:05:00.001-07:00

A mix tape without a playlist is a series of pleasurable mysteries, but a playlist that lacks an accompanying soundtrack cannot support itself for long.

It's a long drive up Montebello Road, up to the summit where midnight is kept at bay by the perpetual sodium glow of the sprawl below; made longer by the ribbon candy logic of Montebello Road itself, replete with hairpins, dropoffs, and blind single lanes. But you still risk the climb, you still say yes to a hazardous excess, you weigh the potential return against your initial investment, and in the end you pack a lunch for two.

Not that there'll be any time to eat. Or that anything will come of it. Return trips are always different from the fumbling first dates.

For years your museum enjoyed infusions of randomosity, contributions from the fringes of cultures popular and unpopular, bits and pieces from collections far and farther; and later or sooner they all smuggled elements into your aural telegrams, your mixed greeting cards, your magnetic hula dances. New wave kissed avant-garde, new jack swing swung with fusion, modern film scores made time with IDM, faux-jazz brushed up against folk rock, alt.country bought post-punk a beer, etc.

It was a time of new horizons in music appreciation.

It's a long drive from San Jose to Seattle, threading the Gordian knot of Bay Area freeways, braving the ennui afforded by Highways 5's length, and girding yourself for the near-instantaneous transition from spring to winter as you crest the Sierras. But you finalized your final exit, you tied up all your loose strings, you took only what you needed plus a little back of what was deserved you. Second only to cutting across all lanes of Pacific Northwest traffic to reach a fleeting exit, the most dangerous element on a road trip of such magnitude is an accompanying popcorn necklace of incongruous, disparate, and inappropriate selections from a library built upon a cooler head and more porous nerves, no matter how telling the message is.

But, as acrimony softens into amicability, so do middle fingers mature into peace signs.

This documentation is inexorably linked to the chemical nostalgia that is inexorably linked to the magnetic record of that one day, that one moment, that one mile, that one sunset, that one night stand. The day she left, the moment he kissed you, the last mile before the city limits, the last sunset before school, the one night punctuated with honey sweat and threatening eyes.

Memory is chemical. Existence is magnetic. Love is write-protected.

Life is Memorex.

⎋

Scriptus Interruptus.

2009-03-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

Lenny Bruce is "not afraid," not "unafraid."

What if you started something you couldn't finish, but really couldn't finish it, as in literally, couldn't finish it, not like you started and stopped and then started again and stopped, then picked it back up again and stopped again, not like if you started and never finished because you kept on starting and stopping, and stopping is not equal to finishing, even though finishing is a kind of stopping, but what if you started something you couldn't finish, how long could you last, how long would it take, what will would you have to possess to continue and continue and so on and so on and et cetera and et cetera and ad nauseum and ad nauseum until there was nothing more to give, nothing more to express, nothing more to contribute, nothing but the same and the old and the same old and the same old and the same old same old, how long until you start to eat your own tail?

And what are the consequences for stopping without finishing?

Some people don't even know what to do with their own art when it gets away from them, when it grows too tall and lanky for the basketball team, when it gains too much bulk to play Twister on top of the teak dining room table any more, when it gets too corporeal and fleshly and opaque to get away with coupling in the master bedroom without attracting some kind of attention from the gentler species with ultrasonic hearing, without attracting metal shavings and ball bearings and other assorted ferrous knockoffs, without attracting the dire wrath of gravity.

Blue skies, red river, yellow eyes.

You know what it's like, you've been through it, you've found yourself lost in the maze at the bottom of the topless hole before and had to feel your way out; you know what it's like, you don't need anyone to tell you again, you don't need a pithy metaphor or a poignant simile or a boring anecdote that couldn't possibly relate to you in the slightest, but you listen anyway, again and again, over and over, only cutting off the end of the story when you have to, when your bus arrives, when the kettle starts to whistle, when the baby mewls for its milk; but you make the executive decision slightly sooner the next time, and slightly sooner the next, sooner and sooner, like measuring and cutting the same piece of wood for a rapidly tilting house.

You know how it ends.

⎋

Un Poisson, Deux Pêche, Les Poissons Rouges, Poissons Bleus.

2009-03-19T21:32:00.001-07:00

Thanks for the reminder.

As if all the world was populated solely by celebrities, and a new newspaper opened its doors every day, skies littered with the husks of disposable airships that neither float away not quite sink back down to earth after they expire, like so many Persian arrows blotting out the sun if only for a moment, like a moment between heartbeats that extends into silent, quiet, temporary death, like a breath taken in, and in, and further in, expanding the lungs a little more, and a little more, stretching the alveoli so they touch the southern tips of the floating ribs, like a horn, like a tropic, like a wreck-in-the-making, proving once-and-future foolishness, trusting the wind to be your wings, gambling that fortune will favor the foolhardy, that fate will embrace the impish, the roguish, the saturnalian apex that any captain, any stardog, any dreamt-of servant of Pallas Athena held close and dear to their armored breast.

Replacements are hard to come by.

But remember not the Spartans, for they knew not the conundrum of teamwork, instead remember ladies in blue, but not ladies who swoon when the blues are crooned, or perhaps croon the blues so that others may swoon; rather, blue women with blue eyes and blue hair and blue lips and blue skin and blue nails and blue nipples and blue scabs on their blue knees and blue spinach between their blue teeth and blue stones on the blue rings caught under their blue knuckles and blue blood flushing their blue brains of any true blue truth; remember that, remember the blue woman, that one blue woman, perched on a perch, puzzlingly parading in a Paris pitch, plying in the park when a spark tears open the dark, and the night becomes to begin to become not unlike a thing not to be so much afraid of any more, not so much a bête noire or a bête bleu or a bête rouge but a thing not borne on the wispy smoke that wafts from the ears of overtaxed thinkers and overwrought dreamers and overburdened feelers who only yearn to feel less of other people's stray thoughts and wayward emotions and bleedthrough ideas and feel more flesh through broken-in linen, through sandpaper denim, through a hundred thousand threadcounts, through heartbeats, through blinks and winks, through sighs of mint and hiccups of lavender and coughs of peppercorn; through to the marrow of the body.

Left to your own devices, you probably would.

But now in your own city, in your own backyard, in your own shoebox of cancelled stamps and expired flyers and crushed folded cranes, how does the crane rise, how does the stamp reclaim its throne, how does the flyer get recertified?

⎋

Small News.

2009-03-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

If Hell is other people, then Purgatory is other people's minutiae.

This isn't anything new, but it has its roots in an older idea, a mother concept, a precursor of a nagging, niggling, neurotic-erotic notion; that of the role of vanity: Look at me. Listen to me. Read about me. Look what I did. Lookit.

The only person anyone ever cares about is themselves, no matter how close they are to the person in second place. It's not wrong, it's not evil, it's not destructive. It's ambitious, it's self-preserving, it's the default setting imprinted on every human; survival of the selfish, obey the orders of the blind gene, inflate the name of the host and cry its praises from the hillocktops. Look at me. Listen to me. Read about me. Look what I did. Lookit.

Small talk from small people. Most of us are small, some of most of us are okay with staying small, but most of some of us aren't. Being small is equivalent to being a whole, as opposed to a sum. Some of us want to be more than our parts, some of us want to be less than most of everyone else, some of us want to be big. Some of us take action to lessen the influence of our inner small person, to quieten the small talk, to quash the pointless prattling, the silly simpering, the nammering about nothing.

And then there's the rest of us, upon whose backs those who would become more than the sum of their parts stomp; those who aspire to be wholer than whole, who dream of growing bigger than small, who say so much but still nothing unless necessary.

...

Next time the muse deigns to light upon your ganglions, take care to give the dear bird your undivided attention, lest you drown a newborn in rainwater, let sleeping dogs lie through their teeth, allow ten thousand truths to rout a single exalted dream, etc.

And take notes.

⎋

Writer's Blech.

2009-02-02T23:25:00.001-08:00

So your queen Selene failed you. So your lord Ra ignores your labors. So your patron Anubis steals your ideas. So your sister Echo mocks you openly. So your conductor Charon lost his way, and thus, yours.

That the days are no more longer than the time it takes Typhon to exhale a single lung should be of some comfort. Take scale into account, factor in perspective, include distance and time and velocity into the equation. You see the whole as a one, but that precludes interpreting the one as a chess cake's playing surface, as a fiddler crab's miniature golf course, as the underside of Mount Olympus' common room carpeting. Now duality sets in, followed by plurality; your vision takes on the characteristics of an insect in low evolution, with a slight overlap in borders, a slight degradation in focus, with a slight suggestion of additional aural input. Soon enuf, synesthesia begins to affect your senses, multiple and segmented frames of one element follow one after another like a silver oxide serpent stitched together with cellotape, the colors you thought you knew so well breaking apart like communion wafers under a wash of charcoal ash and disrobing into fractal shades of this voice and that olfactory memory and this umami pulse and that first, shivery, electric touch.

Just another day in the situation room that is the bone pantheon that is the house for the situation comedy of your golden ego, your obsidian id, your mercury superego. Such myths that exist as much as purple dragonflies, as opium hummingbirds, as dark matter butterflies never so much as darkened the door to your onion cellar, your coal closet, your curio cabinet of ceramic and cloisonné cats. Safe from harm, you subvocalize in your sleep, walking wounded, you mutter during your mantras, to oneself their own reward, you hypothesize while harmonizing the bits and pieces and corners and centers of the day of to-day and the day of to-morrow to come, because the big picture always succumbs at least a little bit to the old gray mare of gravity overnite.

And then, the swift and sweet and slippery oblivion of the approaching warm reboot that comes at the stroke of thirteen, at the sign of Diana's swinging stolen scimitar, riding the careening edge of the evening orb's rooster tail as it sketches a platinum scar across the belly of the sky that has no formal name, no sentient manifestation, no cardboard and particleboard altar baptized in its honor.

Sleep well, dive deep, and crave no breath until the end of the hidden hunt.

⎋

Contraria Contrariis Curantur.

2009-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

An urban sage once said, "It's not where you're from, it's where you're at." Nick Hornby forced his antihero Rob Fleming to face and disprove his own misanthropic axiom "It's what you like, not what you're like." And then there's my own confusing piece of pocket philosophy, "People change, but places stay the same."

These second-hand cookie fortunes all bubbled up as of late in the wake of some recent long-term trends that have only now become noticeable in their translucency, where before they may have been simply occluded by people's natural tendency to filter out that which they either don't care to interpret or can't process simultaneously in their brains, for whatever reason.

Events such as Election Night and Inauguration Day can redirect the population's focus to the present tense, whereas the days and weeks and months leading up to those respective ribbons often manipulate people's views towards the past imperfect tense; the what-ifs, the could-haves and would-haves, the flip-flopping and turnabouts, the twisting and spinning of words, and the worst and most destructive of all, the notion of "the way it was."

Take the modern two-party system we enjoy to-day, for example. Your average surface dweller will probably be able to piece together a rough but accurate analogy for the ideals of either, usually equating to something like Democrats are to farmers what Republicans are to tycoons. A learned citizen, however, might be able to dig deeper into the genealogy of the parties' origins and reveal that a number of the established values of each have actually reversed themselves since their halcyon days; Republicans were originally against bigger government, for example. Revelations like this can lead to bemoanings that a person or an organization or a nation has lost their way, that they no longer follow the intentions of its predecessors, that things are no longer the way they used to be.

But what it it really isn't where you're from, but where you're at? What if the dictates of the past no longer apply to a post-postmodern world? What if adhering to the habits that make up the foundation will only serve to make the structure top-heavy and unwieldy as it grows into the future? What if it isn't the times that change, but the people that take up the space inbetween moments that change?

Another example is that of film adaptations "ruining" their source material, as in the current fanboy fears surrounding the conversion of Watchmen. As a world of consumers, we all have different ways of taking in the myriad genres and formats available to us; sometimes only one type, sometimes all, sometimes in series, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes in order of precedence, sometimes not. The biggest gripe, naturally, comes from the purist factions, who whinge that any adaptation will come under unnecessary scrutiny and modification, therefore spoiling the overall experience from end to end; as if stumbling on a single interpretation is akin to bringing dishonor upon a samurai, a shame that extends in both directions, to past generations and ones yet to be born.

The purist blight is such that so many of its members claim to know what they like and like what they know, so the resulting distress in the aftermath of a poorly-executed adaptation is understandable, especially if the changes wrought are so radical as to wrench the purist so rudely from their comfort zone, from their privacy echo, from their sphere of knowledge. For the purists who believe they are defined by their interests, this becomes a persistent and consistent point of irritation, as the source of their contentment is threatened, not unlike Milo's meadow being developed for oil interests or an otherwise harmless planet being demolished to make way for a hyperspace jump gate.

The fact is, even if something like a Watchmen film sucks ass, it will have no ill effect upon the original print version, no matter how much derision is piled upon the latest and most visible iteration. A trend in remakes, revisions, and reinterpretations may suggest the possibility of one version overwriting the previous, like software upgrades, but unlike technology, ideas never suffer from obsolescence. Like true energy, they are not created and cannot be destroyed, but are simply plucked out from the continuum.

Does this mean that ideas are rootless? Yes and no; if they exist outside the reach of the physical world, they require a human hand to guide them to fruition. In and of themselves, ideas are islands, atoms, impenetrable particles from nowhere in particular with no particular purpose or home or future until they're removed from the vacuum of the continuum and brought into our world of light and motion and color and emotion and graphite. They need our roots to flourish.

But what if you have no roots? What if you have no answer to the prelude to a pick-up line, "So, where are you from?" What if, relatively speaking, your home planet is dead to you?

We call our own personal history our "roots" to give it a physical name, to associate it with the planet of dirt we find ourselves inhabiting the surface of, to link it with our messy and organic and painful origins. But it's an inaccurate descriptor, because while our points of origin may define our initial shape and our first faltering directions, they cannot be held entirely responsible for who we eventually grow to become. Places stay the same, but the people who spring from them cannot stagnate, lest they die. Like the bacterium or the virus or their single-celled brethren who can mutate faster than their human hosts, people have the inherent ability to overcome, to improvise, to adapt faster than their environment.

So, even when we think we've fallen or risen as far as we can, even when we believe that the voices of our past carry straight thru to our final transition, even when we're convinced that David Bowie has finally settled on a look and a style that everyone can agree with, it can all change, it can all be called into question, it can all flip a bitch across a double-yellow line.

Maybe the ones who claim to know us better than we know ourselves are right.

Ask them about that sometime.

⎋

A Brief History Of Failure.

2009-01-08T16:41:00.000-08:00

First:

With the new year comes certain changes at GDI for Your Humble Narrator. Strangely, I find myself doing the same approximate level of work, (sometimes less) for the same amount of time a day, only for more pay. There are no real new responsibilities other than the usual regime of attention to detail, quality control, periodic second-guessing, ad hoc training, and information resourcing; in fact, the whole of the reduced team appears to have been brought down (or raised up) to common levels of authority, in the sense that no one has authority over another except in the realm of professional knowledge. This is to say that while I still have an elevated manager to answer to, I am no more or less accountable for my actions as I was before, which was minimal to begin with. It's almost like being my own boss at times; I do my own thing, I have the luxury of zoning out and focusing on singular projects for days at a time, and I'm rarely asked to perform outside of my own sphere. On the other hand, five fingers: I'm now invited to meetings I was once barred from, communication between associates is smoother and more direct, and a smaller team means that when I excel at something it's that much more noticeable.

At the same time, I'm still a faceless drone, I still do grunt work in the trenches, I'm still laboring for the glory of the Party.

Am I okay with this? As long as I'm getting paid, what difference does it make the level of work I do? Or should I aspire to be more, to do more, to increase the sum of the parts in my brain?

I have a friend, a holdover from previous corporate jobs, who made the decision not to climb the ladders any more after so many years in it. She's ambitious and aggressive, forward-thinking and forthright, intelligent, sharp-witted, and shrewd. She could do anything she put her mind to, and even as she grew older, she still had myriad opportunities in front of her that she could just grab at because she had a skill-set that was in such demand in corporations. But she also realized that The Climb is effectively endless, and that the higher you actually go, the more danger you put yourself in, both internally from maintaining personal standards and externally from performance standards. So, one day (probably over a course of several days, actually) she made a conscious decision to get off the ladder, got married, bought a house, and started to be her own boss, both personally and professionally.

To be fair, climbing the ladder at GDI is incredibly difficult even with superior skills and a university-grade education, and it's a minor modern miracle that someone like Your Humble Narrator with only a modicum of skills and a truncated education was able to squeak by on the merits of my absurd sense of humor, thousand-yard stare, and rugged good looks. So it would figure that why would someone like me even try to put my weight on the rungs? There's a one in a hundred thousand chance that GDI would hire me on permanently, even if I performed above and beyond expectations and abilities, and that's on top of the one in a million chance that GDI tapped me to come onto the project in the first place; so again, as long as the money on the tree continues to grow back for the forseeable future and there's sufficient wiggle room between now and the eventual termination of the contract, (two years at a time at GDI) after which the possibility that I may ultimately end up in either one of two familiar scenarios, (unemployed and happy or gainfully employed and unhappy) what's the harm in throttling back?

Isn't this the very definition of "you are not your job?"

Briefly now, a short primer on the three significant signs of corporate bother, according to what I've been able to observe:

Cutbacks: Not necessarily a barometer for trouble, in fact, most companies will dress cutbacks up as efforts to reduce waste and streamline operations. Targets for cutbacks can include, but aren't limited to, employee benefits, corporate amenities, vendors, contractors, paid time off, etc.
Hiring freezes: When a company stops making money, or starts to lose money, one of the first overt signs is a hiring freeze, because while salaries may not be the biggest drains on capital, they are one of the more controllable factors.
Downsizing: Downsizing and layoffs are more or less the same thing, except one sounds innocuous while the other sounds like a death knell. Outside economics can trigger downsizing, but downsizing can also be isolated, as when local offices reduce staff to consolidate locations, or when labor is outsourced. The bad sort of downsizing is done when a company fails to stop foundering even after cutbacks and hiring freezes, and then proceeds to borrow against itself, so to speak.

In any case, keeping calm and carrying on is the hard and fast rule if you find yourself in a bothersome situation, which is not to say you shouldn't keep your CV updated.

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Branded Delusions.

2009-01-06T17:12:00.000-08:00

Hey, you were the one who suggested we put our unprotected heads inside your preheated oven.

Hey, you were the one who called your record Bad.

Hey, you were the one who wanted to stand in line for forty-five minutes, a half-hour of which was in direct sunlight, just for a stupid cheeseburger.

Hey, you were the one who bought that stack of faded comic books and then read them all in one sitting.

Hey, you were the one who became a doctor and then complained every time another dead body wheeled thru the doors.

Hey, you were the one who wanted to go to the reggae club.

We all revel in our own schizophrenia.

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