The last few days I've been knee-jerking arguing in favor of privilege (something that I mostly argue against) and sexism in video games. It's been surreal. But here are a couple of takeaways that make all the people in the front row smack their foreheads:
1. The people most threatened by the removal of a privilege are the quickest to deny its existence both in terms of the discussion and the thing itself. They jump to prove it's not there.
2. It seems that most people (men) who don't believe that video games have in the past, do so now, and plan to continue to do so in the future commit acts of sexism against women in terms of design and writing seem to be pretty emotionally stunted individuals. Fascinating. I bet there are complimentary line graphs for Bronies and Guys Who Think Women Who Complain About Sexism in Videogames Are Just Ball Busting Bitches.
3. Clarifying something so that people can more clearly hate it makes you as much of a target as if you argued that thing. I.e.:
"No guys, that's not privilege, this is privilege"
"PRIVILEGE ISN'T REAL AND IF YOU TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL I WILL THROW UP FROM MY BUTT INTO YOUR BUTT AND YOUR BUTT WILL BE SUPER GROSS"
"I'm just saying: if you want to hate on something, hate on it right"
"HURBUGHTLBULAHGLULT" (butt sounds)
And I tried to watch Salem last night. God that sucked. It sparked a conversation with my wife, however, on if art has a responsibility to history, or if art has a responsibility to people it portrays. I'm not sure if I phrased that correctly, but it's close enough to arrive at my conclusion which is: no. Art's only obligation is to its own subject matter. And if art is responsible and intelligent, it will do its best to exemplify that subject matter. By that I mean art should try to use it's subject matter to say something meaningful, or will say something meaningful about it's subject matter.
To that end, Salem is not art. Wife was appalled by its cheap cash-in of genuine human, specifically woman, suffering just to have an hour slot of TV to fill. And she's right. It absolutely did that, but I think it did that because of the deeper problem of the show not having a proper obligation to its subject matter. Instead of weaving a faithful recreation that calls into question the sanity of the people involved, or even just a gripping recreation, or instead of weaving a nuanced supernatural narrative that examines man's relationship with women, and man and woman's relationship with the divine, we get lots of shallow motivations, fickle women that try to equate minor pain to being a prisoner of war, and weird Saw like sequences of self-mutilation that disappear faster than whatever point they were trying to make. Oh, and a crooked priest. No one saw that coming. What a let down.
And then there's that new Avril Lavigne video that has the internet upset about appropriations. I said it once, I'll say it again: I thought Avril Lavigne blew her brains out in the 80s when she realized no one thought she was funny anymore.
Kind of like privilege, I feel a little like cultural appropriation is one of those white guilt conversations where it's difficult to tell when it's right to engage. Much like the privilege discussion, it's super valuable on a certain level (like the level where we stop doing black face and giving black characters to white actors), but then there's the Tumblr level in which anything that isn't genderless sex mannequins standing absolutely still and making prolonged eye contact is automatically sexist, misogynist, privileged, racist, appropriationist, homophobic. Not Halal. Those are all incredibly valuable conversations and they all have a strong backbone of truth, but Tumblr probably isn't equipped to handle adult conversations.
So Avril dances around singing about Hello Kitty and sushi (or chocolate, or none of those things. Who knows what noises her mouth makes) doing her best to look like some J-pop sweet heart while her indentured servants dance behind her. It's a really fucking stupid video. And websites like Jezebel (which I like) get mad about cultural appropriation. Which might be valid. But I can't help but think there are two issues here:
1. What's the difference between appropriation and "has Japanese stuff in it"? It seems like all these Tumblr-esque conversations pushes those two lines closer and closer to each other until they're sitting right on top of each other and privilege becomes "alive" and appropriation becomes "has knowledge of other places." Like Jeff Winger said: "Not being racist has become the new racism." And there's the larger problem of:
2. It just sucks. Unlike the larger problems of sexism, oppression, and appropriation at large, this song is a terrible piece of crap (though if I had to choose, I'd choose this song over her stupid faux-post-punk stuff that got her popular in the first place) that will disappear in months, or possibly a year if it by some chance is up for an award. Even if it wins an award, like Best Song of The Year, it'll vaporize. Remember that chick Vitamin-C (I think that's her name) that existed, like, ten years ago that everyone was mad at for reasons?
Much like art's responsibility, maybe we should hold artist's feet to the fire for making bad art. It's more of a global thing, right? If Avril was a more serious musician, she probably would have been at least a little more thoughtful of how she incorporated those Mooninite slave girls into her video. Plus, isolating Avril and making an example of her is a little like blaming Michael Bay for making a terrible movie: you're absolutely right, but he's too dumb to understand what you're talking about.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Privilege
Talking with my wife tonight, we talked quite a bit about the idea of privilege, and why I'm tired of hearing about it.
First, it is absolutely vital that everyone on the planet keeps an eye out for their own assumptions and why they have them. It would have helped Mitt Romney look significantly less retarded, for example. And people who say things like, "Why don't they just speak English," or, "Well, I haven't ever heard that (as if somehow ignorance undoes reality)," do definitely need to do some privilege checking. But here's the problem I have:
There's a tendency in children's movie writing to make simple things the object. In watching a documentary on the Bronie phenomena, they discussed how the cartoon is all about friendship and teaching lessons and junk. How didactic of it. I can't help but feel that in media aimed at children there's this unfortunate tendency to make the given the point. Yes: of course you're friends. So were Luke and Han and Enkidu and Gilgamesh, but so the fuck what? What next? And then what? Well, and then Luke and Han murder the shit out of a space murderball, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh murder some stuff. But with children's stuff, the fact that Enkidu has a friend is the ultimate point. The fact that Luke has a friend is the central theme. You'll note that older children's faire doesn't make the simple the ultimate.
When was the last time you felt scandalized that a woman or a black man were seen out and about voting? You'd have to scrounge quite thoroughly to encounter such a person in America. And if you did, it's probably be in the perennially stereotypable South.
That's how it is with privilege. It's basic, it's given, it isn't the end result, but the step right before, "Yeah? So?" It's the morning shit just after the coffee and before you leave the house: necessary, but you don't really make a big deal out of it (usually). Yes, Mitt, we all know you're ridiculously wealthy. Yeah? So? Ah. I see. You are crazy constipated.
This notion of "check your privilege" has become something like describing your disgusting I-had-nothing-but-whiskey-and-Taco-Bell morning shits to total strangers in that if you do that, there can be no more conversation. It's a real showstopper. If you make privilege the point of all discussions about racial sensitivity, well, there can't really be anything after the ultimate point, can there? Imagine how many conversations must be stopped cold because someone's told they need to "check their privilege." Oh shit, I am white, so that bars me from speaking about anything. I guess you win. Or don't. Or whatever: we're arguing, not playing checkers. Is there really a winner?
But again, I am white, and I made sure to visit the best porcelain bowl before I hit the road.
Yeah? So?
First, it is absolutely vital that everyone on the planet keeps an eye out for their own assumptions and why they have them. It would have helped Mitt Romney look significantly less retarded, for example. And people who say things like, "Why don't they just speak English," or, "Well, I haven't ever heard that (as if somehow ignorance undoes reality)," do definitely need to do some privilege checking. But here's the problem I have:
There's a tendency in children's movie writing to make simple things the object. In watching a documentary on the Bronie phenomena, they discussed how the cartoon is all about friendship and teaching lessons and junk. How didactic of it. I can't help but feel that in media aimed at children there's this unfortunate tendency to make the given the point. Yes: of course you're friends. So were Luke and Han and Enkidu and Gilgamesh, but so the fuck what? What next? And then what? Well, and then Luke and Han murder the shit out of a space murderball, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh murder some stuff. But with children's stuff, the fact that Enkidu has a friend is the ultimate point. The fact that Luke has a friend is the central theme. You'll note that older children's faire doesn't make the simple the ultimate.
When was the last time you felt scandalized that a woman or a black man were seen out and about voting? You'd have to scrounge quite thoroughly to encounter such a person in America. And if you did, it's probably be in the perennially stereotypable South.
That's how it is with privilege. It's basic, it's given, it isn't the end result, but the step right before, "Yeah? So?" It's the morning shit just after the coffee and before you leave the house: necessary, but you don't really make a big deal out of it (usually). Yes, Mitt, we all know you're ridiculously wealthy. Yeah? So? Ah. I see. You are crazy constipated.
This notion of "check your privilege" has become something like describing your disgusting I-had-nothing-but-whiskey-and-Taco-Bell morning shits to total strangers in that if you do that, there can be no more conversation. It's a real showstopper. If you make privilege the point of all discussions about racial sensitivity, well, there can't really be anything after the ultimate point, can there? Imagine how many conversations must be stopped cold because someone's told they need to "check their privilege." Oh shit, I am white, so that bars me from speaking about anything. I guess you win. Or don't. Or whatever: we're arguing, not playing checkers. Is there really a winner?
But again, I am white, and I made sure to visit the best porcelain bowl before I hit the road.
Yeah? So?
Saturday, August 4, 2012
I actually meant to talk about the hemispheres of the brain.
Government and corporations are like dinosaurs: massive outmoded things sucking up all the resources consuming themselves to death. One theory of dinosaur extinction says that as the climate cooled into one of the several ice ages Earth has experienced, they needed more resources than the freezing planet could offer up. The much smaller mammals who needed far less to survive thrived while the dinosaurs ate themselves to death. I think I believe alongside most that it was actually a meteor that led to the death of the dinosaurs, but the same principle applied: the dinosaurs needed more resources than could be offered up. Mammals thrived. Eventually dinosaurs disappeared.
I think the image in our heads is one of a peaceful inevitable decline in which the dinosaurs, too unaware to process what was happening around them, passed away melancholy like; beatific in the way they lay their heads in the dirt, shut their eyes and never opened them again. But I imagine the reality to be unchartable brutality and fear: giants fighting over scraps, hoarding every last bit they could for themselves consuming even the small amounts of food stashed away by the miniscule rat-like mammals consuming the mammal itself should larger meat prove too scarce. Being a mammal in this time would have been horrific between finding food and avoiding the monsters.
Eventually, when the dinosaurs passed, mammals were allowed to flourish and experience abundance. We’ve yet to again experience the diversity of forms seen in the cambrian, but it might be safe to say that the trade off is in the increase of complexity within the individual forms. But if technology is the 6th kingdom like Kevin Kelley speculates, then we’re experiencing a proliferation of forms at least on par with the cambrian if not greater than.
With the monsters gone, individual complexity proliferated. But the monsters didn’t want to go - they held on with every angry claw in their bodies. So it is with our current monsters - government and corporations, the latter being the son of the former. I don’t think this is anything new that I’m saying here. This observation is almost cliche and sophomoric with how common I feel its sentiment. Government is the system that springs up thanks to bullies, but exists long after it achieved its goal (which would be what? Establishing order?). It’s like the washed up rock star that keeps writing the same song over and over trying to re-establish his long lost fame. Rather, it’s like government goes through a metamorphosis: in its initial stage, it’s the bully that springs up to regulate the other bullies - that’s the order. Instead of vanishing after having corralled the bullies, however, it enters a second stage in which it extends its controls from the bullies to everyone else. Now it wants to control everyone, and this becomes its only goal, but since this is perhaps contrary to nature (as if I, a city mouse, has even an inkling of how nature works), it has to get more insidious in its control designs. Thus it moves from slave to worker, though there exists little difference between the two. The worker is perhaps allotted more freedom - or even just perceived freedom - in the form of his slavery, and his beatings only come when he refuses the government its tithe and tax.
The corporation is the result of the second phase, the symbiotic relationship that comes when the nobility breaks from government and rule their own micro-realms. Those realms quickly grow, and lest government itself be overrun, it must learn to cooperate with the new monster. The new monster wants slaves, true, but more than that, it wants the resources brought about by the natural product of people’s work. People create simply because people are - it seems as necessary to our health and happiness as sex and food. Or perhaps it’s a result of people trying to get sex and food. I mean, this is even more a cliche argument than the first: corporations want to turn people into money.
But despite both these monsters, individual wealth (or happiness, or potential access to wealth and happiness) does increase with the more refined of the monsters. The monsters of America and Europe, for example, give their serfs better toys and more time than the monsters of Libya. Despite the natural inclinations of the monsters, the serfs continue to pull more of the resources for themselves.
But then the death throws, which is what I think is happening now. Just like the dinosaurs before them, the government and the corporation are entering their death throws, taking for themselves everything they can find - every scrap dollar, intellectual or property right, raising the bar of entry so high that the small mammals of this age is better off hiding and hoping the collapse of the monsters comes soon.
Perhaps you could say the throws is a third stage in the metamorphosis, and comes to so closely resemble the first that it’s difficult to tell if it’s a second wind, or a winding down. But it’s a winding down when the natural cycles have worked to spread the wealth and complexity uniformly, and the bullies the monsters seek to fight exist only through the repeated religious repetition of their existence. Monsters lock in contest with each other while the mammals hide and wait.
I think the image in our heads is one of a peaceful inevitable decline in which the dinosaurs, too unaware to process what was happening around them, passed away melancholy like; beatific in the way they lay their heads in the dirt, shut their eyes and never opened them again. But I imagine the reality to be unchartable brutality and fear: giants fighting over scraps, hoarding every last bit they could for themselves consuming even the small amounts of food stashed away by the miniscule rat-like mammals consuming the mammal itself should larger meat prove too scarce. Being a mammal in this time would have been horrific between finding food and avoiding the monsters.
Eventually, when the dinosaurs passed, mammals were allowed to flourish and experience abundance. We’ve yet to again experience the diversity of forms seen in the cambrian, but it might be safe to say that the trade off is in the increase of complexity within the individual forms. But if technology is the 6th kingdom like Kevin Kelley speculates, then we’re experiencing a proliferation of forms at least on par with the cambrian if not greater than.
With the monsters gone, individual complexity proliferated. But the monsters didn’t want to go - they held on with every angry claw in their bodies. So it is with our current monsters - government and corporations, the latter being the son of the former. I don’t think this is anything new that I’m saying here. This observation is almost cliche and sophomoric with how common I feel its sentiment. Government is the system that springs up thanks to bullies, but exists long after it achieved its goal (which would be what? Establishing order?). It’s like the washed up rock star that keeps writing the same song over and over trying to re-establish his long lost fame. Rather, it’s like government goes through a metamorphosis: in its initial stage, it’s the bully that springs up to regulate the other bullies - that’s the order. Instead of vanishing after having corralled the bullies, however, it enters a second stage in which it extends its controls from the bullies to everyone else. Now it wants to control everyone, and this becomes its only goal, but since this is perhaps contrary to nature (as if I, a city mouse, has even an inkling of how nature works), it has to get more insidious in its control designs. Thus it moves from slave to worker, though there exists little difference between the two. The worker is perhaps allotted more freedom - or even just perceived freedom - in the form of his slavery, and his beatings only come when he refuses the government its tithe and tax.
The corporation is the result of the second phase, the symbiotic relationship that comes when the nobility breaks from government and rule their own micro-realms. Those realms quickly grow, and lest government itself be overrun, it must learn to cooperate with the new monster. The new monster wants slaves, true, but more than that, it wants the resources brought about by the natural product of people’s work. People create simply because people are - it seems as necessary to our health and happiness as sex and food. Or perhaps it’s a result of people trying to get sex and food. I mean, this is even more a cliche argument than the first: corporations want to turn people into money.
But despite both these monsters, individual wealth (or happiness, or potential access to wealth and happiness) does increase with the more refined of the monsters. The monsters of America and Europe, for example, give their serfs better toys and more time than the monsters of Libya. Despite the natural inclinations of the monsters, the serfs continue to pull more of the resources for themselves.
But then the death throws, which is what I think is happening now. Just like the dinosaurs before them, the government and the corporation are entering their death throws, taking for themselves everything they can find - every scrap dollar, intellectual or property right, raising the bar of entry so high that the small mammals of this age is better off hiding and hoping the collapse of the monsters comes soon.
Perhaps you could say the throws is a third stage in the metamorphosis, and comes to so closely resemble the first that it’s difficult to tell if it’s a second wind, or a winding down. But it’s a winding down when the natural cycles have worked to spread the wealth and complexity uniformly, and the bullies the monsters seek to fight exist only through the repeated religious repetition of their existence. Monsters lock in contest with each other while the mammals hide and wait.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Predator Mind: How I Came to Notice It.
I've found myself increasingly becoming friends with vegans, and only one of which is vegan by necessity: irritable bowel syndrome that, to list the table of contents in the Book of Foods Which Irritate, would boggle and perhaps depress. Every other individual cites moral obligation as the deciding factor bringing up the health benefits as a secondary measure, as of something to convince an amoral person, that is someone who doesn't really believe something like a moral code exists.
Let me open by saying that I greatly respect the beliefs of anyone who came about those beliefs through a hard fought and won struggle. I would much rather associate with people who will disagree with every word that comes out of my mouth because they've had to wrestle with those issues to degrees of pain than associate with individuals who'd parrot my every thought because of some kind of ease whether group identification or because they've never had to wrestle with anything in their life. Or because it's in vogue right now. More than a few of the vegans I've come to know are that way because veganism's kind of popular right now: food guilt is this year's new leopard print.
There is thoughtlessness on both sides of the aisle. I remember when I was first confronted with the idea of animal cruelty as concerns food production: I was maybe nineteen, and PETA had launched an anti-meat campaign in which they filmed the cruelty that goes hand in hand with factory farming. Two men escorted a pig to a concrete pad (a third individual whether an informant or participant held a camera) where they proceeded to hit the pig with hammers and kick it and laugh and make jokes. One man started shocking the pig's anus with his cattle prod, and the whole time the poor thing is screaming. Then one of the men takes the rivet gun that was supposed to be the pig's release from the start and fires a bolt. The man mis-aimed and only injured the pig's brain. Now the thing is partially paralyzed, but still writhing, screaming, and seizing, and the men still laugh. Finally, another man approaches with a mallet and bashes the pig's skull in. It takes about five solid whacks, most of which fail to hit the pig square in the head, and the pig still twitches after the final stroke. I felt so fucking bad for that poor pig. Whether or not we need to eat that pig, he didn't deserve that.
Horrified, I showed it to The Most Conservative Human on The Planet, who was my best friend at the time. His response revealed a shocking gap in the philosophy of Conservative Evangelical Republican Christianity that stuck in my brain like a nine inch splinter:
"I don't really care if people are cruel to animals if that animal is just going to be food anyways. After all, we're just going to eat it right?" I have since learned not to be shocked when the religion that argues for the soul of the unborn (something I do truck with. Mostly) reduces almost all other processes to gross materialistic means. His response was almost more horrific than the video (which I made him watch).
At that time I tried to make it a habit to read one Proverb and one Psalm a day, and the next day, the kind of Synchronicity That Argues For Something More Than Just Statistical Odds reared its head, and I read Proverbs 12:10, which reads, "10 A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal,
but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel." I approached him with this verse and pointed out that a shepherd culture, such as that of the ancient Hebrews, understood that you have to treat your animals kindly, that there was president here and elsewhere that proper care of animals, even ones you intend to eat, is on par with the proper treatment of people, whether for economic or moral reasons, the point is these ancient writers expected you to take care of your sheep and cattle as well as you take care of your mother. Further, I argued, psychology shows time and again that cruelty to animals foreshadows cruelty to humans. He shrugged and said, "Yeah, I guess." That might be the moment I stopped being friends with him, but it took a couple years for that to sink in.
The pig has stuck with me, and I realized then that animal cruelty is something humans have disapproved of for thousands of years, that meat wasn't evil, but abusing meat was (and is). It made me think of the Native American tribes that purportedly thanked the spirit of the animal for dying so they could live, and then going on to use every part of the animal so its death wouldn't have been in vain. This brought me to the Judeo-Christian tradition of praying before a meal and I thought, "What if these two traditions aren't much closer than we might suspect?" I broached the idea to my family before Sunday dinner: what if God wants us to pray before each meal so that we don't forget that sacrifice is a part of life. What if he doesn't want us to "bless the food to our bodies" because our bodies will naturally do with food what they've been designed to do since the creation of bodies (whether you argue thousands or millions of years), but rather we pray to remember that this chicken, cow, fish, or pig died so I could keep living, to give this beast a brief remembrance and gratitude before diving in and to know sometime it might be me on the dinner plate of worms or even some creature like a lion or polar bear (who are known to hunt humans). For a religion that believes there is life after this one, Christianity has a hard time thinking on its own death.
To this day my family still asked that the food be "blessed to their bodies."
Let me open by saying that I greatly respect the beliefs of anyone who came about those beliefs through a hard fought and won struggle. I would much rather associate with people who will disagree with every word that comes out of my mouth because they've had to wrestle with those issues to degrees of pain than associate with individuals who'd parrot my every thought because of some kind of ease whether group identification or because they've never had to wrestle with anything in their life. Or because it's in vogue right now. More than a few of the vegans I've come to know are that way because veganism's kind of popular right now: food guilt is this year's new leopard print.
There is thoughtlessness on both sides of the aisle. I remember when I was first confronted with the idea of animal cruelty as concerns food production: I was maybe nineteen, and PETA had launched an anti-meat campaign in which they filmed the cruelty that goes hand in hand with factory farming. Two men escorted a pig to a concrete pad (a third individual whether an informant or participant held a camera) where they proceeded to hit the pig with hammers and kick it and laugh and make jokes. One man started shocking the pig's anus with his cattle prod, and the whole time the poor thing is screaming. Then one of the men takes the rivet gun that was supposed to be the pig's release from the start and fires a bolt. The man mis-aimed and only injured the pig's brain. Now the thing is partially paralyzed, but still writhing, screaming, and seizing, and the men still laugh. Finally, another man approaches with a mallet and bashes the pig's skull in. It takes about five solid whacks, most of which fail to hit the pig square in the head, and the pig still twitches after the final stroke. I felt so fucking bad for that poor pig. Whether or not we need to eat that pig, he didn't deserve that.
Horrified, I showed it to The Most Conservative Human on The Planet, who was my best friend at the time. His response revealed a shocking gap in the philosophy of Conservative Evangelical Republican Christianity that stuck in my brain like a nine inch splinter:
"I don't really care if people are cruel to animals if that animal is just going to be food anyways. After all, we're just going to eat it right?" I have since learned not to be shocked when the religion that argues for the soul of the unborn (something I do truck with. Mostly) reduces almost all other processes to gross materialistic means. His response was almost more horrific than the video (which I made him watch).
At that time I tried to make it a habit to read one Proverb and one Psalm a day, and the next day, the kind of Synchronicity That Argues For Something More Than Just Statistical Odds reared its head, and I read Proverbs 12:10, which reads, "10 A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal,
but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel." I approached him with this verse and pointed out that a shepherd culture, such as that of the ancient Hebrews, understood that you have to treat your animals kindly, that there was president here and elsewhere that proper care of animals, even ones you intend to eat, is on par with the proper treatment of people, whether for economic or moral reasons, the point is these ancient writers expected you to take care of your sheep and cattle as well as you take care of your mother. Further, I argued, psychology shows time and again that cruelty to animals foreshadows cruelty to humans. He shrugged and said, "Yeah, I guess." That might be the moment I stopped being friends with him, but it took a couple years for that to sink in.
The pig has stuck with me, and I realized then that animal cruelty is something humans have disapproved of for thousands of years, that meat wasn't evil, but abusing meat was (and is). It made me think of the Native American tribes that purportedly thanked the spirit of the animal for dying so they could live, and then going on to use every part of the animal so its death wouldn't have been in vain. This brought me to the Judeo-Christian tradition of praying before a meal and I thought, "What if these two traditions aren't much closer than we might suspect?" I broached the idea to my family before Sunday dinner: what if God wants us to pray before each meal so that we don't forget that sacrifice is a part of life. What if he doesn't want us to "bless the food to our bodies" because our bodies will naturally do with food what they've been designed to do since the creation of bodies (whether you argue thousands or millions of years), but rather we pray to remember that this chicken, cow, fish, or pig died so I could keep living, to give this beast a brief remembrance and gratitude before diving in and to know sometime it might be me on the dinner plate of worms or even some creature like a lion or polar bear (who are known to hunt humans). For a religion that believes there is life after this one, Christianity has a hard time thinking on its own death.
To this day my family still asked that the food be "blessed to their bodies."
Thursday, December 15, 2011
NDAA research copied from Facebook
I wrote and investigated this as a response to something a friend from Facebook pointed out: there's a provision in the bill in D.1032.b.1 that says explicitly that American citizens are exempt from this bill that would, supposedly, allow the US military to indefinitely hold American citizens without trial. There are a couple of different factors happening here, some of which are irrationality and ignorance.
My personal opinion (not culled from research) is that the US government has shown how much they care about our right (of the press) to free speech with how they've reacted since 9/11 and with press at all the Occupy sites. In short: not very much. Therefore a bill that allows indefinite imprisonment without a trial (even though it specifies it's non-applicability to US citizens) that uses the military as a police force sounds like a bad idea that could be easily fudged to support the agenda of the government.
Having said that, there are some problems with the way in which this bill was initially drafted (in secret by McCain and Levin). This guy (who's as crazy as a site named "Texas GOP Vote" can possibly be) initially reacts to the fact that the bill was written in secret. He doesn't mention it here, but the bill was passed without a single hearing, and the media has blacked out coverage on this story (link). So, the secrecy of what's happening borders on illegal while the media blackout is scary given that the majority of citizens still get their news from major media outlets. At least those people that didn't grow up with a computer in their living room. Either way, it's a frightening proposition that a significant portion of the population that doesn't read news on the internet or from alternative sources could be so terrifyingly ignorant of what's happening. But not because they don't read the news, but because they get it from a major source.
The next thing is that apparently during the debate itself over the bill, senators disagreed as to whether or not it would apply to American citizens. After all, There's a prevision (D.1031.a) that gives the president the right to "use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war." Later on in the bill is a section saying (D.1032.a.4), "The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States." Paragraph 1 is all about the military holding people until "disposition under the law of war." If I read this correctly, this is essentially the basis for secret and indefinite arrest. But the most concerning is the part where the President gets to do whatever's necessary to protect America's interest. It wouldn't be difficult for the president to decide that this particular American is a big enough threat that D.1032.b.1 can be waived.
As I said, even the senators disagree. Once again in this article (link), Graham says that it absolutely applies to citizens and turns the homeland into the battlefield. The Russians have the motherland, the Germans get the fatherland, we get the homeland. The situation with this guy is that he could just be wrong. He could be so ridiculously wrong about the super super obvious - the bill doesn't apply to American citizens - but the fact that he even wants it to apply to citizens shows that there is a wide margin for abuse. The same article describes that anyone who provides aid or information to a terrorist qualifies as a terrorist under the Patriot Act, thus the NDAA potentially opens the door even wider to allow for people's actions to be interpreted as terrorist aid.
But the most worrisome element of all is precedent. There is already precedent for American citizens being denied fair trial in the interest of "national security." There is Anwar al-Akwali who was the guy on YouTube who preached in favor of Al Qaeda. The situation here is a lot of speculation, but General Dunlap said that he views American citizens overseas speaking against America as enemy combatants. Al-Akwali was an American citizen, so theoretically, he should have been put in custody and taken back here for a proper trial. This blog discusses that in the first draft of the bill, it absolutely would/could apply to citizens, but in the new bill, the provision was stuck in. He isn't very convinced that it still won't apply to citizens, and he also quotes General Dunlap saying that the Authorization of Use of Military Force Resolution of 2002 (look this sucker up on Wikipedia. The author at Lawfare Blog doesn't cite this specifically, but I looked and found what the AUMF was, and what he was talking about) classifies Americans overseas as possible combatants.
A lot of what's happening, both in the senate chambers and the news sphere, is uncertain speculation and a little bit of fear mongering. But ultimately, there is strong precedence set forth in which 1. our rights have been ignored (both now and in the past: Japanese internment camps; McCarthy hearings; repeated denial of the press); 2. Americans have been and could be detained or executed without a trial; 3. the government has shown intention of extending the war to its citizens (in both the former form of the bill in which McCain wanted to be able to pursue American citizens directly, and the AUMF).
In thinking about the bill and the fact that 93/100 voting senators passed it, I can only come to the conclusion that there are two types of people voting in favor of it: 1. The exceptionally terrified senator that thinks either the Devil or Osama is hiding under every rock, or 2. The senator that has been bought and sold. There's a lot of money to be made in both war and detention.
Added note 12/15: this thing passed yesterday 283 to 136. That is very sad.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Thinking Through Definitions: SOPA
If anyone here (all both of you) pays attention to my F'book page, you'll see that I haven't shut up about SOPA since I first learned about it. Everyday I read through all the SOPA headlines looking for new information, or even new takes on old information. This morning, The Washington Post had two articles that caught my eye, primarily because they had comments from proponents of the bill. These comments bring up interesting definitional issues that I doubt will ever be discussed by our legislators, and might even be a little bit too difficult of a topic than most of them are willing to engage in. Especially because this legislation has the stink of corporate wealth on it.
SOPA Opposition Goes Viral
The first, as you can see, talks about how companies like Tumblr, Reddit, and Mozilla were able to successfully bring their userbase around to this issue while the major media companies failed, despite having used "The Twitter." Anyone who has spent any time floating around the internet could have told these companies it would fail. Hard. The internet has a keen nose for rooting out insincerity, and this measure is Insincere of The First Order. Remember when Sony made that fake PSP blog? No one bought it. Or more recently, how about this? PROTIP: I linked to the Google search page because I can't bring myself to support this site. Even with only my clicks. The reason these folks (Reddit, Mozzila et al) were able to rally the support is that the user base feels like these sites really get what they want. And they do. The media companies only, always have and always will, try to convince us what they want. They're just mad now because for the first time in 80 or so years, a large portion of the consumers have become immunized.
SOPA Goes for House Debate:
It comes from the silliest Republican on the planet (who isn't currently a woman running for president), Rep. Lamar Smith:
The capstone of any republic or democracy today is the idea that it's the rule of the people. By the people, for the people. If 1/4 of all internet traffic is used just for infringement, as Smith claims, then there is at least 1/4 of the world internet using population that thinks copyright as it stands is insufficient in some way. And I bet that number is low. If a friend burns a CD for you, gives you a tape of last night's Community (because no one wants to use Hulu, with its inane commercials squaking at you every seven minutes), throws an audiobook on your iPod, makes a mixtape for your wedding, or shows a movie at a neighborhood block party, then you're an infringer too. The law has become so tight, that it's too easy to become a criminal without even realizing it. And now the media companies want to make it tighter.
My point is that an increasing number of people worldwide are violating copyright in such a way that it should be obvious that copyright is what needs changing. By the people, for the people. And as the Public Domain Manifesto states: "Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of our societies." So much of what the internet does is convert the copyright into a public domain, repurposing extant works to new ends.
However, you should never take credit for something you didn't create (something the internet by and large excels at), and you should never make money off of something you didn't make (something flea markets do not excel at).
SOPA Opposition Goes Viral
The first, as you can see, talks about how companies like Tumblr, Reddit, and Mozilla were able to successfully bring their userbase around to this issue while the major media companies failed, despite having used "The Twitter." Anyone who has spent any time floating around the internet could have told these companies it would fail. Hard. The internet has a keen nose for rooting out insincerity, and this measure is Insincere of The First Order. Remember when Sony made that fake PSP blog? No one bought it. Or more recently, how about this? PROTIP: I linked to the Google search page because I can't bring myself to support this site. Even with only my clicks. The reason these folks (Reddit, Mozzila et al) were able to rally the support is that the user base feels like these sites really get what they want. And they do. The media companies only, always have and always will, try to convince us what they want. They're just mad now because for the first time in 80 or so years, a large portion of the consumers have become immunized.
Opposition to the bill is growing from the technology world. On Tuesday, the Business Software Alliance, which represents Microsoft, Intel, Adobe and Apple, pulled its support of the legislation, saying that it “needs work” and that some “valid and important questions” have been raised.It's about time these companies stepped up in support. Microsoft, Intel, and Apple might all ride the big media line, but ultimately they recognize who uses their junk.
Legislative pushes for the bill in both chambers highlight a consensus among lawmakers and some businesses that online piracy and counterfeiting has become a rampant problem that has drained the pockets of media firms, authors, software and filmmakers who are seeing their goods exchanged for free on the Internet.This is just false. On two accounts: 1. Any study worth its salt shows that piracy doesn't hurt media companies. Like this one, or this one showing that, quite possibly, so-called pirates are your best customers. There are also questionable studies that are probably fake. Or very flawed. Or the product of fevered imagination. The point is that companies that say they hurt haven't been paying attention. My favorite is the one that analyzes what media companies believe the purchasing power of the public to be.
Yet while they agree with the spirit of the bill, many technology firms are opposed to the measure as it stands.I wonder how true this is. Perhaps some companies, Microsoft and Apple for instance, would definitely be opposed to piracy, but others, like Google, Facebook, Tumblr, and even Yahoo (though they might deny it), definitely benefit. I feel certain that these companies only dance along so as not to later become suspects in whatever iteration of SOPA or PIPA emerge.
This makes me wonder what he would consider censorship. Moreover, this would definitely damage internet culture. The internet's culture depends irrevocably on the ability to freely share any kind of information. Furthermore, I'm certain there's a fallacy of argumentation that says something about how if a party has a vested interest in the debate's outcome, then that person's input is suspect. Of course he's going to say it won't hurt the internet because he benefits the most if it passes.But the bill’s proponents — which include the Motion Picture Association of America — say that concerns that the bill would damage Internet culture, promote government censorship or encroach on the First Amendment are overblown. Michael O’Leary, the MPAA’s senior executive vice president for global policy and external affairs, said rhetoric comparing provisions in SOPA to Web censorship are “laughable.”
“This bill has due process,” he said. “It covers activities that are, under federal law, illegal, and requires that any order issued is public and transparent.”
SOPA Goes for House Debate:
“The bill provides effective due process to the parties involved. A federal judge must first agree that the website in question is dedicated to illegal and infringing activity,” Smith said recently in a statement. “Only then will a court order be issued directing companies to sever ties with the illegal website. Legitimate websites have nothing to worry about under this bill.”This one is out of chronological order, and from the first article, but it's my favorite and forms the center of what's really going on here. Best for last and so forth.
It comes from the silliest Republican on the planet (who isn't currently a woman running for president), Rep. Lamar Smith:
“Claims that this bill will ‘break’ the Internet are unfounded. When one-quarter of Internet traffic is infringing, something is already in need of repair,” he said, adding that “over-the-top rhetoric intended to excite opposition” is clouding the underlying problem of online piracy.This is the most fascinating because, if true, it indicates a distinct shift in cultural thought that is being entirely ignored. If one full quarter of the entire world wide web is being used for "infringing," then that indicates to me a growing trend in the world outlook concerning copyright is greatly changing. And this is, I think, the unaddressed crux of the argument.
The capstone of any republic or democracy today is the idea that it's the rule of the people. By the people, for the people. If 1/4 of all internet traffic is used just for infringement, as Smith claims, then there is at least 1/4 of the world internet using population that thinks copyright as it stands is insufficient in some way. And I bet that number is low. If a friend burns a CD for you, gives you a tape of last night's Community (because no one wants to use Hulu, with its inane commercials squaking at you every seven minutes), throws an audiobook on your iPod, makes a mixtape for your wedding, or shows a movie at a neighborhood block party, then you're an infringer too. The law has become so tight, that it's too easy to become a criminal without even realizing it. And now the media companies want to make it tighter.
My point is that an increasing number of people worldwide are violating copyright in such a way that it should be obvious that copyright is what needs changing. By the people, for the people. And as the Public Domain Manifesto states: "Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of our societies." So much of what the internet does is convert the copyright into a public domain, repurposing extant works to new ends.
However, you should never take credit for something you didn't create (something the internet by and large excels at), and you should never make money off of something you didn't make (something flea markets do not excel at).
Monday, November 7, 2011
Blogging Through a (Comic) Book: Bad Island pt. 3: The Final Word
This book was actually really good. Way better than Doug's last five I want to say. Still not Jacobus good in terms of realized story telling and art, and not Gears good in terms of bizarre and funny, but it's up there. I'd say maybe top five.
I realize that some of my running commentary sounded maybe snarky and perhaps small minded or vindictive, but you probably didn't read Ghostopolis or Flink or Monster Zoo, so you don't know the kind of expectations I had walking into the joint. A lot of my negativity was not deserved.
I think the biggest difference between this and Ghostopolis (the other TenNapel joint I reviewed) is that Ghostopolis was plagued with things so heavy handed and obvious that I frequently got embarrassment goosebumps. Tuskegee Joe is the most ready example. I think this overwhelming obviousness stemmed from the fact that Ghostopolis, for whatever reason, was overly burdened with providing metaphors for Christianity, but metaphors that didn't even work or make sense. There was also the art. Ghost gave the sense that Doug didn't really understand how to work Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Painter, or whatever digital program he was using.
There was also the profusion of loose ends that got tied in Ghostopolis. The ending felt a lot like the end to Return of The King when you're certain Frodo and Sam are about to make out, and that's during the third of maybe five-ish endings. Ghostopolis was too neat.
But let me talk about Bad Island. The art is so much better. I still wish the art was black and white brush work of the Doug of yore, but barring that, I still wish it was an old fashion brush instead of digital. And the color. Doug has admitted before that he's not a strong colorist, and that shows in the Saturday-morning-cartoon kind of way that the book's colored. When you read a book like Jacobus or Creature Tech, you are absolutely not imagining coloring like you'd see on Dora The Explorer (Doug does use more muted colors than that, but exclusively uses the two-tone style of shading). If Doug wants to color his books now, something I'd try to persuade him against, I'd recommend something more abstract or experimental. The monster designs in this book are pretty interesting. I think my favorite are the muppet looking aliens that live on the backs of the rock giants.
From a story perspective, it's much leaner than Ghostopolis, and half of it feels similar to the Gear story. I don't want to spoil too much, but without any exposition, the story communicates that the massive stone deities have been battling these insect and gray alien looking monsters for thousands of years. The monsters have been trying to enslave the small muppet creatures while the stone deities depend on the creatures to run certain parts of them almost like robots. Very cool.
The story was much closer to an ensemble story than anything else Doug's done. It's not quite wholly an ensemble story as only one character experiences change, and really only two of them get developed. I'm not sure why the wife and daughter were even necessary characters. The wife's knowledge proved to be necessary, but not her character.
The family's story is so run of the mill that it's forgettable. I feel like they're all stock characters, and I always felt a little disappointed every time I turned the page to see that they were still the focus of the story. In a 218 page story, that's lots of tiny disappointments.
The father/son backstory seems to have all this import, but nothing really happens with it. You find that the son almost suffocated to death on his mucus when he was a baby, and the dad was all shaken. But that's sort of it. The son had planned to run away before the trip, but it's never revealed why, nor are there any textual clues beyond the fact that he's just a rebellious teenager. You never learn more than a single thing about the mother or the daughter: mom's a botanist, daughter collects animals. Mostly, they're just plant and payoff characters. All the humans felt really insubstantial. I know Doug's method of storytelling is to tell a story in such a way that it's constantly getting pushed forward: every picture and word should reveal plot or character or both, and I appreciate that. I strive for that in my own writing. But these characters are all so one note that I feel cheated that the climax of the story is their reunion and safety. The aliens were so much more interesting.
Which brings me to the things that were unresolved. I complained about Ghostopolis' almost compulsive need to tie things up, but I feel like some large things involving the deities go unaddressed. The king, when he thinks his son has been killed, surrenders, and the muppets ask him if they are to be slaves again. He responds that he would do anything to save them, including his own death, but he can't handle the death of his son. So, at the end of a book is a single frame showing the deity father and son's reunion. And that's it? What about the slavery issue? That's way more interesting than if the stock Disney Channel family gets home in time to see Friends.
There's also a single panel in the book that shows the son deity eating a bunch of monsters. Alive. Apparently this is how the creatures get their energy to do battle. That one panel showed more promise for the direction of the story than almost any other panel in the book. Creatures that eat other living creatures wholesale like that brings up interesting ethical problems. Are they really as good as they say they are? Is it OK to eat these small monsters if we assume they're evil? Does this slaughter have anything to do with the war in outerspace?
Mainly, Doug made the mistake of making his support characters (in this instance, they're almost props) way more interesting than his main characters. I feel like this is a pretty constant problem, however, when your main characters have been normal humans for the last 5 or 6 books. It was a problem with Ghost too. The world is more fascinating than the characters. There was a time when Doug's characters were outright weird. This time might have been in a minority of his books, but Gear doesn't even have humans in it. Creature Tech is a human being almost-possessed by an alien symbiote. Jacobus focused on two regular humans, but one came from a very weird place through very weird means, and the other one had to try to comprehend him directly. I guess with Ghost and Bad Island, Doug just juxtaposes the human and the weird, but has stopped them from directly acting with each other. In an odd way, this sort of dehumanizes the stories. Instead of seeing how humanity acts when confronted with the bizarre, humanity only gets to indirectly participate in it, and therefore their reactions are much more muted.
One thing that was really effective is that there isn't a hidden Evangelical element. You could argue there's one with the prince deity, but if there is, it's so subtle that it doesn't break the story. Several of Doug's stories have a witnessing element that's so shoved in, it makes the story difficult to accept. I think it was Tolkien that said good Christian writing should first and foremost be good writing, and then Christian. That might have also been CS Lewis, and if it's neither of those guys, then I made it up. But if it was those two guys, then you'll notice that Lord of The Rings and Until We Have Faces are both totally void of any overt-punching-you-in-the-ding-ding Christian references. But Bad Island doesn't have any bad or overt religious references, and I think it's a better book for it.
I liken the shoe horning of the gospel message into fiction by Christians to the ubiquity of the Dreamworks face in Dreamworks cartoons, or the moment of internal defeat in Pixar cartoons. Everyone knows about dreamworks face. But the Moment of Internal Doubt in Pixar cartoons is always the final moment of the second act. It's when the hero sighs meaningfully and looks longingly at his hands before he makes a pronouncement about how he can't do it. In the Incredibles, it's the moment in the plane across the ocean when Mr. Incredible sighs, looks down at his hands, shrugs, and says how he can't do it if he thinks his family isn't safe. That's the clearest example.
Would I buy Bad Island? Probably not. Maybe if you're a hardcore TenNapel fan. While it is so much better than Ghostopolis (and Flink, and Monster Zoo, and Black Cherry, and Power-Up), it's still not quite Jacobus, or Gear, or Creature Tech. Or even Iron West (and that was the first Doug book I felt iffy about after I bought it. I even lied on an Amazon review because I kind of thought of Doug as a friend.). I would recommend that you read Bad Island. It's worth reading. And if you like it, then pick up Jacobus. Buy it for full price. It's that good. Then buy Gear. You'll laugh yourself stupid.
I realize that some of my running commentary sounded maybe snarky and perhaps small minded or vindictive, but you probably didn't read Ghostopolis or Flink or Monster Zoo, so you don't know the kind of expectations I had walking into the joint. A lot of my negativity was not deserved.
I think the biggest difference between this and Ghostopolis (the other TenNapel joint I reviewed) is that Ghostopolis was plagued with things so heavy handed and obvious that I frequently got embarrassment goosebumps. Tuskegee Joe is the most ready example. I think this overwhelming obviousness stemmed from the fact that Ghostopolis, for whatever reason, was overly burdened with providing metaphors for Christianity, but metaphors that didn't even work or make sense. There was also the art. Ghost gave the sense that Doug didn't really understand how to work Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Painter, or whatever digital program he was using.
There was also the profusion of loose ends that got tied in Ghostopolis. The ending felt a lot like the end to Return of The King when you're certain Frodo and Sam are about to make out, and that's during the third of maybe five-ish endings. Ghostopolis was too neat.
But let me talk about Bad Island. The art is so much better. I still wish the art was black and white brush work of the Doug of yore, but barring that, I still wish it was an old fashion brush instead of digital. And the color. Doug has admitted before that he's not a strong colorist, and that shows in the Saturday-morning-cartoon kind of way that the book's colored. When you read a book like Jacobus or Creature Tech, you are absolutely not imagining coloring like you'd see on Dora The Explorer (Doug does use more muted colors than that, but exclusively uses the two-tone style of shading). If Doug wants to color his books now, something I'd try to persuade him against, I'd recommend something more abstract or experimental. The monster designs in this book are pretty interesting. I think my favorite are the muppet looking aliens that live on the backs of the rock giants.
From a story perspective, it's much leaner than Ghostopolis, and half of it feels similar to the Gear story. I don't want to spoil too much, but without any exposition, the story communicates that the massive stone deities have been battling these insect and gray alien looking monsters for thousands of years. The monsters have been trying to enslave the small muppet creatures while the stone deities depend on the creatures to run certain parts of them almost like robots. Very cool.
The story was much closer to an ensemble story than anything else Doug's done. It's not quite wholly an ensemble story as only one character experiences change, and really only two of them get developed. I'm not sure why the wife and daughter were even necessary characters. The wife's knowledge proved to be necessary, but not her character.
The family's story is so run of the mill that it's forgettable. I feel like they're all stock characters, and I always felt a little disappointed every time I turned the page to see that they were still the focus of the story. In a 218 page story, that's lots of tiny disappointments.
The father/son backstory seems to have all this import, but nothing really happens with it. You find that the son almost suffocated to death on his mucus when he was a baby, and the dad was all shaken. But that's sort of it. The son had planned to run away before the trip, but it's never revealed why, nor are there any textual clues beyond the fact that he's just a rebellious teenager. You never learn more than a single thing about the mother or the daughter: mom's a botanist, daughter collects animals. Mostly, they're just plant and payoff characters. All the humans felt really insubstantial. I know Doug's method of storytelling is to tell a story in such a way that it's constantly getting pushed forward: every picture and word should reveal plot or character or both, and I appreciate that. I strive for that in my own writing. But these characters are all so one note that I feel cheated that the climax of the story is their reunion and safety. The aliens were so much more interesting.
Which brings me to the things that were unresolved. I complained about Ghostopolis' almost compulsive need to tie things up, but I feel like some large things involving the deities go unaddressed. The king, when he thinks his son has been killed, surrenders, and the muppets ask him if they are to be slaves again. He responds that he would do anything to save them, including his own death, but he can't handle the death of his son. So, at the end of a book is a single frame showing the deity father and son's reunion. And that's it? What about the slavery issue? That's way more interesting than if the stock Disney Channel family gets home in time to see Friends.
There's also a single panel in the book that shows the son deity eating a bunch of monsters. Alive. Apparently this is how the creatures get their energy to do battle. That one panel showed more promise for the direction of the story than almost any other panel in the book. Creatures that eat other living creatures wholesale like that brings up interesting ethical problems. Are they really as good as they say they are? Is it OK to eat these small monsters if we assume they're evil? Does this slaughter have anything to do with the war in outerspace?
Mainly, Doug made the mistake of making his support characters (in this instance, they're almost props) way more interesting than his main characters. I feel like this is a pretty constant problem, however, when your main characters have been normal humans for the last 5 or 6 books. It was a problem with Ghost too. The world is more fascinating than the characters. There was a time when Doug's characters were outright weird. This time might have been in a minority of his books, but Gear doesn't even have humans in it. Creature Tech is a human being almost-possessed by an alien symbiote. Jacobus focused on two regular humans, but one came from a very weird place through very weird means, and the other one had to try to comprehend him directly. I guess with Ghost and Bad Island, Doug just juxtaposes the human and the weird, but has stopped them from directly acting with each other. In an odd way, this sort of dehumanizes the stories. Instead of seeing how humanity acts when confronted with the bizarre, humanity only gets to indirectly participate in it, and therefore their reactions are much more muted.
One thing that was really effective is that there isn't a hidden Evangelical element. You could argue there's one with the prince deity, but if there is, it's so subtle that it doesn't break the story. Several of Doug's stories have a witnessing element that's so shoved in, it makes the story difficult to accept. I think it was Tolkien that said good Christian writing should first and foremost be good writing, and then Christian. That might have also been CS Lewis, and if it's neither of those guys, then I made it up. But if it was those two guys, then you'll notice that Lord of The Rings and Until We Have Faces are both totally void of any overt-punching-you-in-the-ding-ding Christian references. But Bad Island doesn't have any bad or overt religious references, and I think it's a better book for it.
I liken the shoe horning of the gospel message into fiction by Christians to the ubiquity of the Dreamworks face in Dreamworks cartoons, or the moment of internal defeat in Pixar cartoons. Everyone knows about dreamworks face. But the Moment of Internal Doubt in Pixar cartoons is always the final moment of the second act. It's when the hero sighs meaningfully and looks longingly at his hands before he makes a pronouncement about how he can't do it. In the Incredibles, it's the moment in the plane across the ocean when Mr. Incredible sighs, looks down at his hands, shrugs, and says how he can't do it if he thinks his family isn't safe. That's the clearest example.
Would I buy Bad Island? Probably not. Maybe if you're a hardcore TenNapel fan. While it is so much better than Ghostopolis (and Flink, and Monster Zoo, and Black Cherry, and Power-Up), it's still not quite Jacobus, or Gear, or Creature Tech. Or even Iron West (and that was the first Doug book I felt iffy about after I bought it. I even lied on an Amazon review because I kind of thought of Doug as a friend.). I would recommend that you read Bad Island. It's worth reading. And if you like it, then pick up Jacobus. Buy it for full price. It's that good. Then buy Gear. You'll laugh yourself stupid.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Blogging through a (comic) book: Bad Island pt. 2: My Reaction
So last post I gave some background on who Doug is and some of his work. Now I'm just going to go through the book and comment on the things I see. This is probably only interesting to people who've read it, or have a vested interest in Doug's work.
Bad Island - Doug TenNapel.
Ok, right off the bat I have a gaggy problem. His last book, Ghostopolis, while not his worst is in the running for the worst, was the first to make use of an entirely digital process: digital inks, digital colors, digital pencils. Some artists can pull this off, but that talent is so rare that I can't think of one off the top of my head. Ashley Wood? Close enough.
The problem is that so much of the force behind the ink is lost when you go digital. In Jacobus, two strokes convey an entire mood. In this, it takes all the ink, the color, and then the dialog before I really get the mood. It's so much less powerful and meaningful.
And then the color's flat. Just do black and white.
And now I'll actually read words from this book.
The robot designs are cool. Very Gear. The dialog is iffy. So far it's just a stream of madeup words. That's something I can do without. The scientists look like knockoff muppets, but it works.
Even though this book is all digital like his last one, the inking looks way better than Ghostopolis. Ghost's inking reminded me of me at first year art school trying to figure out photoshop. Dead Island is much more sophisticated. There's that.
I'm not far in (this blog while you read thing is taxing), but so far it's a story about a race of marklar who recently got free from another race of enemy marklar. The marklar need to get some marklar from some marklars to power their giant robot marklar. While doing this, evil marklar swoop in and there's violence. The other story is a family getting ready for a trip to Florida, or something (who voluntarily goes to Florida that isn't full of arthritis?). The kids are stereotypes - sullen untrustable teenage son that doesn't want to go, and oblivious daughter obsessed with her snake - and generally, I have more empathy for the scientist marklars. I have no idea who the main character is. Probably Reese because he has to learn a lesson about responsibility. And then welcome Jaysus in his heart.
Also I can't find a reference for Florida. I think I made that up. But it still stands: Florida is awful.
Page 22: sad Dreamworks face.
Only on page 27, but I just realized a lot of Doug's work (in fact, maybe all except Gears and Creature Tech) rely heavily on character's with father issues. I both like this and think it's a crutch. Like: because most heroes do have father problems stretching all the way back to ancient mythology through modern day. Crutch: because EVERY one of his protagonists is a dude with father issues. There's no variety there at all.
P. 33: the issue of the main character is further confused by the fact that the mother has a vision of marklar scientists forced into slave labor. Maybe Doug's going for an ensemble story? That would be new.
P. 37: girl asks if her dead snake went to heaven. Maybe kids ask that. Maybe severely churched kids ask that. By the time I was severely churched, I was too old for that question. Instead I asked the abstracted: do animals go to heaven. Just curious, but does anyone know a kid that asked that?
Scratch that: my wife did ask that. Apparently it's a real question. Good to know. I figured it was a TV trope that people bandy about and eventually it becomes a real thing by the ubiquity of its presence on TV.
P. 40: God's balls. Their boat just got destroyed and the family's reaction is sarcastic quips. This rips me up and down both sides. I understand that fiction isn't reality, and in fact, I would vehemently argue against the validity of realism, but it's absolutely meaningless to make all the characters that respond to devastation to do so with flippancy.
P. 44: No grown man is that inept with matches. Humor fail.
P. 48: A plant from the first 10 pages of the story about the mom being a botanist pays off. She has a greenhouse. Similarly, there was a plant from the beginning from the mom about how no one, "wants to go on this stupid trip." In time, dad's father issues will be revealed.
Doug's creature designs in this one are pretty cool. They just saw this pink 3 eyed naked crow looking thing. Very Neverhood-esque.
P. 82: Somehow the guy who can't manage to work a matchbook managed to rig up a trap sophisticated enough to catch an alien looking monster.
P. 83: Apparently the alien feels scaly, like, "Reese's athlete's foot times ten!" Oh lols. Oh wait. The opposite of lol. How about we just say it's like a lizard, eh?
I want to linger on this point for a second. It's a common misconception in writing to think that if you make up a bizarre analogy ("like my athlete's foot times ten!") that it creates a more vivid image than saying what it's actually like. This abstraction is neither vivid or funny. In descriptions, be concrete and specific to be effective.
p. 84: Reese's reaction to an anthropomorphic tree grabbing his leg is, "out of my pants, creep." No one in this story has funny reactions, or even ones that make sense.
P. 86: Reese cuts off one of the trees arms. The dad says, "Cutting the vines only makes it stronger." How does he know this? This is the first limb of the story to get chopped.
P. 89: The little girl slept through the tree and alien attack. Dad says, "She's got the right idea." None of that makes sense. Maybe it's supposed to be commentary about the faith of a child or something, but I reiterate that it doesn't really make sense.
P. 98: The giant robot battle marklars from the first page are actually some sort of ancient alien gods with the tiny muppet marklars living in small societies on their backs. That's actually a really cool setup. Wouldn't ya know... the oldest marklar deity has a son, and that son's angsty too! And everyone knows that ancient alien city gods don't use contractions.
P. 100: The robot gods eat monstrous animals for energy. This is a really cool idea with some very profound implications. I'm interested see how it pans out.
P. 158: The plant with the little girl's proclivity for animal collection paid off in the form of an alien armadillo that shoots barbs when it sneezes. That sentence got away from me. The plant paid off when the mother of this pup frees the family from certain doom. Nevermind that the brother kicked the creature into the forest. This feels a little deus ex machina.
P. 160: Well, at least the large mother creature only rescued the family from doom so that it could murder the son. That's good.
P. 180: There it is. Dad trusts son now.
P. 188: I figured out the plot. But I'm not telling. Also, I'm 30 pages from the end. Not that impressive.
P. 189: Balls. The plot I just figured out means that the son alien deity is a metaphor for Jesus, on account of the Father (to keep his people from being enslaved) says, "don't ask me to sacrifice my son."
P. 218: Huh. That metaphor didn't get anymore complex than, "Please don't make me murder my kid." I'm glad.
Bad Island - Doug TenNapel.
Ok, right off the bat I have a gaggy problem. His last book, Ghostopolis, while not his worst is in the running for the worst, was the first to make use of an entirely digital process: digital inks, digital colors, digital pencils. Some artists can pull this off, but that talent is so rare that I can't think of one off the top of my head. Ashley Wood? Close enough.
The problem is that so much of the force behind the ink is lost when you go digital. In Jacobus, two strokes convey an entire mood. In this, it takes all the ink, the color, and then the dialog before I really get the mood. It's so much less powerful and meaningful.
And then the color's flat. Just do black and white.
And now I'll actually read words from this book.
The robot designs are cool. Very Gear. The dialog is iffy. So far it's just a stream of madeup words. That's something I can do without. The scientists look like knockoff muppets, but it works.
Even though this book is all digital like his last one, the inking looks way better than Ghostopolis. Ghost's inking reminded me of me at first year art school trying to figure out photoshop. Dead Island is much more sophisticated. There's that.
I'm not far in (this blog while you read thing is taxing), but so far it's a story about a race of marklar who recently got free from another race of enemy marklar. The marklar need to get some marklar from some marklars to power their giant robot marklar. While doing this, evil marklar swoop in and there's violence. The other story is a family getting ready for a trip to Florida, or something (who voluntarily goes to Florida that isn't full of arthritis?). The kids are stereotypes - sullen untrustable teenage son that doesn't want to go, and oblivious daughter obsessed with her snake - and generally, I have more empathy for the scientist marklars. I have no idea who the main character is. Probably Reese because he has to learn a lesson about responsibility. And then welcome Jaysus in his heart.
Also I can't find a reference for Florida. I think I made that up. But it still stands: Florida is awful.
Page 22: sad Dreamworks face.
Only on page 27, but I just realized a lot of Doug's work (in fact, maybe all except Gears and Creature Tech) rely heavily on character's with father issues. I both like this and think it's a crutch. Like: because most heroes do have father problems stretching all the way back to ancient mythology through modern day. Crutch: because EVERY one of his protagonists is a dude with father issues. There's no variety there at all.
P. 33: the issue of the main character is further confused by the fact that the mother has a vision of marklar scientists forced into slave labor. Maybe Doug's going for an ensemble story? That would be new.
P. 37: girl asks if her dead snake went to heaven. Maybe kids ask that. Maybe severely churched kids ask that. By the time I was severely churched, I was too old for that question. Instead I asked the abstracted: do animals go to heaven. Just curious, but does anyone know a kid that asked that?
Scratch that: my wife did ask that. Apparently it's a real question. Good to know. I figured it was a TV trope that people bandy about and eventually it becomes a real thing by the ubiquity of its presence on TV.
P. 40: God's balls. Their boat just got destroyed and the family's reaction is sarcastic quips. This rips me up and down both sides. I understand that fiction isn't reality, and in fact, I would vehemently argue against the validity of realism, but it's absolutely meaningless to make all the characters that respond to devastation to do so with flippancy.
P. 44: No grown man is that inept with matches. Humor fail.
P. 48: A plant from the first 10 pages of the story about the mom being a botanist pays off. She has a greenhouse. Similarly, there was a plant from the beginning from the mom about how no one, "wants to go on this stupid trip." In time, dad's father issues will be revealed.
Doug's creature designs in this one are pretty cool. They just saw this pink 3 eyed naked crow looking thing. Very Neverhood-esque.
P. 82: Somehow the guy who can't manage to work a matchbook managed to rig up a trap sophisticated enough to catch an alien looking monster.
P. 83: Apparently the alien feels scaly, like, "Reese's athlete's foot times ten!" Oh lols. Oh wait. The opposite of lol. How about we just say it's like a lizard, eh?
I want to linger on this point for a second. It's a common misconception in writing to think that if you make up a bizarre analogy ("like my athlete's foot times ten!") that it creates a more vivid image than saying what it's actually like. This abstraction is neither vivid or funny. In descriptions, be concrete and specific to be effective.
p. 84: Reese's reaction to an anthropomorphic tree grabbing his leg is, "out of my pants, creep." No one in this story has funny reactions, or even ones that make sense.
P. 86: Reese cuts off one of the trees arms. The dad says, "Cutting the vines only makes it stronger." How does he know this? This is the first limb of the story to get chopped.
P. 89: The little girl slept through the tree and alien attack. Dad says, "She's got the right idea." None of that makes sense. Maybe it's supposed to be commentary about the faith of a child or something, but I reiterate that it doesn't really make sense.
P. 98: The giant robot battle marklars from the first page are actually some sort of ancient alien gods with the tiny muppet marklars living in small societies on their backs. That's actually a really cool setup. Wouldn't ya know... the oldest marklar deity has a son, and that son's angsty too! And everyone knows that ancient alien city gods don't use contractions.
P. 100: The robot gods eat monstrous animals for energy. This is a really cool idea with some very profound implications. I'm interested see how it pans out.
P. 158: The plant with the little girl's proclivity for animal collection paid off in the form of an alien armadillo that shoots barbs when it sneezes. That sentence got away from me. The plant paid off when the mother of this pup frees the family from certain doom. Nevermind that the brother kicked the creature into the forest. This feels a little deus ex machina.
P. 160: Well, at least the large mother creature only rescued the family from doom so that it could murder the son. That's good.
P. 180: There it is. Dad trusts son now.
P. 188: I figured out the plot. But I'm not telling. Also, I'm 30 pages from the end. Not that impressive.
P. 189: Balls. The plot I just figured out means that the son alien deity is a metaphor for Jesus, on account of the Father (to keep his people from being enslaved) says, "don't ask me to sacrifice my son."
P. 218: Huh. That metaphor didn't get anymore complex than, "Please don't make me murder my kid." I'm glad.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Blogging Through a (Comic) Book: Bad Island pt. 1: A Preface
I just picked up Bad Island by Doug TenNapel. If you've heard of Doug, it's because you've met me, played Earthworm Jim, or (more unlikely) played The NeverHood. It's probably only the best computer game to have ever been made, and almost no one played it.
So, here's the thing: Doug is a gifted artist, at least with a brush. And I've bought almost everyone of his graphic novels. Gear (his first), and Earthboy Jacobus are my absolute favorites. At some point, however, the comics just became not worth buying. There came a point where it seemed like the stories weren't quite justifying their ticket prices of 10, 15, or 20 dollars. Which is a shame. I really like supporting art that I can really get behind, and Doug's art is there. If the man released a limited edition hard bound art book, I would save up and buy it. Seriously: he's a monster with an inking brush.
At first I figured it was just diversifying taste that did it. I went through some pretty profound personal changes, and my tastes in other areas changed, so why not this one? But I noticed that all his books contained the same arch: lazy layabout learns responsibility; saves day. Next I noticed it was the clumsy way in which he implemented religion into his books. I'm not at all opposed to the (smart) integration of religion into art. In fact, I often think the best art is in some way religious. Two of my favorite authors (Grant Morrison and Alan Moore) have often talked about how their fiction is a way to communicate their "religions" (quotes were used because they don't have formal codified religions, but do have a particular way of viewing the world that they want to show others). The way CS Lewis wove religion into his Silent Planet Trilogy and Until We Have Faces? Profound. Profound while being blatantly Christian (at least in the Planet Trilogy). The Fountain is my favorite movie, and that's Aaronofsky essentially laying out his view of how reality works. Or should.
But Doug's stuff is clumsy. I never open a book from Doug and wonder if the protagonist will convert to some version of Christianity by the end. It's a no-brainer in a way that kills any would-have-been-well-implemeneted religious tension. But even that could be easily looked over. It definitely weakens a story to have an alien promoting communion (but not an alien version of communion. No - an alien confirming our very human idea of communion, as if Jesus might only save them if they can come to him on human terms), or a man that tries to pass off the traditional Christian creation story as some kind of indecipherable myth (spoiler alert: it's not), but these things don't kill a story. No, in the end, what made it so hard for me to justify throwing down that hard earned dough is the disneyfication of his stories.
By disneyfication I mean the tendency of movies made for family (or mass) consumption to throw out a cacophony of loose threads and subplots into the central narrative, many not actually adding substance to the work as a whole, just for the sake of having a long form 3rd act resolution. Not only does Jeff win the skating championship, but he gets a contract with the skating company, so now he has enough money to pay all of his mom's medical bills and get his little brother out of debtor's prison. His dad may not come back from the dead, but his dad's ghost does appear to say, "Hey, your stepdad might not be me, but he's a good guy, and you should give him a chance. Also, there was no magic in those shoes: the magic was in you the whole time." He also gets the girl and his lost dog comes back. And his stepdad gets his job back at the dirt factory. With a promotion. Endings that are so relentingly saccharine, there's no freedom for you as the viewer to interpret or even have your own reaction. It's too airtight and spelled out, and that's what killed it for me.
After that long intro (in which I can't emphasize enough how great of an artist Doug is [if he'd kick that horrible digital habit], and how great Earthboy Jacobus and Gear are. Seriously. Stop reading this, get those, then come back here), I started this entry to say that I just picked up his newest book (from the library. Like I said: I'd love to buy a new TenNapel joint, but I can't justify bad art) and I want to blog through my reactions as I read it. And here we go... on the next post.
So, here's the thing: Doug is a gifted artist, at least with a brush. And I've bought almost everyone of his graphic novels. Gear (his first), and Earthboy Jacobus are my absolute favorites. At some point, however, the comics just became not worth buying. There came a point where it seemed like the stories weren't quite justifying their ticket prices of 10, 15, or 20 dollars. Which is a shame. I really like supporting art that I can really get behind, and Doug's art is there. If the man released a limited edition hard bound art book, I would save up and buy it. Seriously: he's a monster with an inking brush.
At first I figured it was just diversifying taste that did it. I went through some pretty profound personal changes, and my tastes in other areas changed, so why not this one? But I noticed that all his books contained the same arch: lazy layabout learns responsibility; saves day. Next I noticed it was the clumsy way in which he implemented religion into his books. I'm not at all opposed to the (smart) integration of religion into art. In fact, I often think the best art is in some way religious. Two of my favorite authors (Grant Morrison and Alan Moore) have often talked about how their fiction is a way to communicate their "religions" (quotes were used because they don't have formal codified religions, but do have a particular way of viewing the world that they want to show others). The way CS Lewis wove religion into his Silent Planet Trilogy and Until We Have Faces? Profound. Profound while being blatantly Christian (at least in the Planet Trilogy). The Fountain is my favorite movie, and that's Aaronofsky essentially laying out his view of how reality works. Or should.
But Doug's stuff is clumsy. I never open a book from Doug and wonder if the protagonist will convert to some version of Christianity by the end. It's a no-brainer in a way that kills any would-have-been-well-implemeneted religious tension. But even that could be easily looked over. It definitely weakens a story to have an alien promoting communion (but not an alien version of communion. No - an alien confirming our very human idea of communion, as if Jesus might only save them if they can come to him on human terms), or a man that tries to pass off the traditional Christian creation story as some kind of indecipherable myth (spoiler alert: it's not), but these things don't kill a story. No, in the end, what made it so hard for me to justify throwing down that hard earned dough is the disneyfication of his stories.
By disneyfication I mean the tendency of movies made for family (or mass) consumption to throw out a cacophony of loose threads and subplots into the central narrative, many not actually adding substance to the work as a whole, just for the sake of having a long form 3rd act resolution. Not only does Jeff win the skating championship, but he gets a contract with the skating company, so now he has enough money to pay all of his mom's medical bills and get his little brother out of debtor's prison. His dad may not come back from the dead, but his dad's ghost does appear to say, "Hey, your stepdad might not be me, but he's a good guy, and you should give him a chance. Also, there was no magic in those shoes: the magic was in you the whole time." He also gets the girl and his lost dog comes back. And his stepdad gets his job back at the dirt factory. With a promotion. Endings that are so relentingly saccharine, there's no freedom for you as the viewer to interpret or even have your own reaction. It's too airtight and spelled out, and that's what killed it for me.
After that long intro (in which I can't emphasize enough how great of an artist Doug is [if he'd kick that horrible digital habit], and how great Earthboy Jacobus and Gear are. Seriously. Stop reading this, get those, then come back here), I started this entry to say that I just picked up his newest book (from the library. Like I said: I'd love to buy a new TenNapel joint, but I can't justify bad art) and I want to blog through my reactions as I read it. And here we go... on the next post.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Sumsum about piracy
Piracy is something that's always on my mind: how it seems to be something that companies fear and revile and the average internet user is gravitating towards. Piracy is becoming simple enough that you could teach grandma how to find every episode of Mattlock online in one exasperating afternoon. Perhaps not quite, but it's getting there. At the very least you'd need several exasperating follow up appointments in which grandma asks you what the start button is.
But it's gotten to the point that I know that I could find pretty much anything I want online. Often I don't even have to download it, just have to have the patience to comb through links. As a defense, companies continually offer up arcane practices that just make it more difficult for the person willing to spend the money to want to spend the money. Ask any PC gamer about the hassle of DRM. Some practices veer into the bizarre and incomprehensible. Have you ever tried to watch an imported movie on your Mac? You can't.
The fear for the companies is the loss of revenue (which light research will show that fear to be invalid). Understandable, though all signs seem to indicate that he who steals the most also buys the most. This must mean that there's a discrepancy in the way a company perceives piracy and the way an active pirate practices piracy. To the company: I'm stealing something. I want, for free, that which costs money. To the pirate, there are vast objective realities to contend with which the modern company ignores or does not perceive.
1. The pirate isn't actually taking anything of value. Anyone who has dealt with computers for any period of time recognizes that the material value of the things on their hard drive is almost nill. The physical value of my hard drive is a couple pounds (maybe) of metal and plastic. Like 2 dollars of physical material. This document that I'm typing up right now will be represented as a magnetic blip on a plate of aluminum (aluminum, right?) somewhere on Blogger's server. The actual value of this is nothing. It's made of almost-nothing. That Transformers 3 movie you (hopefully mistakenly) pirated? The same value of this document, except it's magnetic blip is bigger. Every pirate knows that these things don't actually have a value attached to them, and “stealing” them doesn't rob the object of its value. Rather, that null-value is doubled and spread. TF3, as terrible of an idea as it is to take up hard drive space with that movie, has more value if you and I have a copy as opposed to just me. Moreover, if you, I, and a guy in Liberia all have a copy, it's worth that much more.
2. Companies make it too damn difficult to figure out how much you like their crap. ITunes (how the balls do you capitalize that for initial sentence position?) has finally caught onto this, at least a little bit, by offering a minute and a half long sample of their music. Which really does go along way. Instead of spending 5 minutes, at the longest, sampling an album to figure out how badly I want to throw my money at it, now it's at least a 15 minute process. And it has won me over a few times. They still insist on a 30 second preview of movies, which makes no sense. If a song get's almost 2 minutes, shouldn't a movie get a 10 or 20 minute preview? Especially for TV shows where all they show you is the intro. Blah blah blah. Like I said – companies make it too difficult to figure out how much I might like their crap. HBO is perhaps the most sterling example of this. Their stuff (I guess for reasons that make sense to content providers like Comcast) is totally exclusive to satellite and cable companies. When my wife and I were trying to figure out if Deadwood was a show worth buying, what recourse did we have but to find a 3rd party site that streams Deadwood without HBO's permission? Piracy is a great way to figure out what you want to spend your money on. This has the added benefit of survival of the strongest: the best stuff continues to thrive while the forgettable stuff will get forgotten. If it wasn't for someone hosting that first Cloud Cult album on their site for free, I wouldn't have bought the other seven or eight. Because of that one act of piracy, Cloud Cult has made far more off of me than they could have hoped to otherwise.
3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.
There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.
But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.
That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.
You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).
I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.
3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.
There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.
But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.
That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.
You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).
I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.
But it's gotten to the point that I know that I could find pretty much anything I want online. Often I don't even have to download it, just have to have the patience to comb through links. As a defense, companies continually offer up arcane practices that just make it more difficult for the person willing to spend the money to want to spend the money. Ask any PC gamer about the hassle of DRM. Some practices veer into the bizarre and incomprehensible. Have you ever tried to watch an imported movie on your Mac? You can't.
The fear for the companies is the loss of revenue (which light research will show that fear to be invalid). Understandable, though all signs seem to indicate that he who steals the most also buys the most. This must mean that there's a discrepancy in the way a company perceives piracy and the way an active pirate practices piracy. To the company: I'm stealing something. I want, for free, that which costs money. To the pirate, there are vast objective realities to contend with which the modern company ignores or does not perceive.
1. The pirate isn't actually taking anything of value. Anyone who has dealt with computers for any period of time recognizes that the material value of the things on their hard drive is almost nill. The physical value of my hard drive is a couple pounds (maybe) of metal and plastic. Like 2 dollars of physical material. This document that I'm typing up right now will be represented as a magnetic blip on a plate of aluminum (aluminum, right?) somewhere on Blogger's server. The actual value of this is nothing. It's made of almost-nothing. That Transformers 3 movie you (hopefully mistakenly) pirated? The same value of this document, except it's magnetic blip is bigger. Every pirate knows that these things don't actually have a value attached to them, and “stealing” them doesn't rob the object of its value. Rather, that null-value is doubled and spread. TF3, as terrible of an idea as it is to take up hard drive space with that movie, has more value if you and I have a copy as opposed to just me. Moreover, if you, I, and a guy in Liberia all have a copy, it's worth that much more.
2. Companies make it too damn difficult to figure out how much you like their crap. ITunes (how the balls do you capitalize that for initial sentence position?) has finally caught onto this, at least a little bit, by offering a minute and a half long sample of their music. Which really does go along way. Instead of spending 5 minutes, at the longest, sampling an album to figure out how badly I want to throw my money at it, now it's at least a 15 minute process. And it has won me over a few times. They still insist on a 30 second preview of movies, which makes no sense. If a song get's almost 2 minutes, shouldn't a movie get a 10 or 20 minute preview? Especially for TV shows where all they show you is the intro. Blah blah blah. Like I said – companies make it too difficult to figure out how much I might like their crap. HBO is perhaps the most sterling example of this. Their stuff (I guess for reasons that make sense to content providers like Comcast) is totally exclusive to satellite and cable companies. When my wife and I were trying to figure out if Deadwood was a show worth buying, what recourse did we have but to find a 3rd party site that streams Deadwood without HBO's permission? Piracy is a great way to figure out what you want to spend your money on. This has the added benefit of survival of the strongest: the best stuff continues to thrive while the forgettable stuff will get forgotten. If it wasn't for someone hosting that first Cloud Cult album on their site for free, I wouldn't have bought the other seven or eight. Because of that one act of piracy, Cloud Cult has made far more off of me than they could have hoped to otherwise.
3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.
There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.
But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.
That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.
You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).
I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.
3. I already briefly mentioned this, but piracy acts as a way to make sure the good stuff gets out there and gets supported. There is an avalanche of evidence to support this. An independent report in Australia found that those that pirate the most music also buy the most, which means that when the industry institutes psychotic measures to protect their property, they only effect those that are buying the least. By not catering to a pirate's mindset, they're only hurting themselves. In almost every venue that I could find, this is true.
There are problems, and I do want to talk about those, particularly with our culture's newest fetish for digitizing non-digital formats (like books and comics). If I get to it, that could be next post, because that's where I think things get interesting.
But for the sake of the now, what are things companies could do to thrive? Well, first off is the mistaken notion that people don't want to pay. Not so. Most people, probably everyone except for that malicious minority that view stealing as holy writ, start at the legal venues and work down from there. For example, The Wind, a super obscure silent film, was my wife and I's first date. I wanted to buy it, so I check Amazon, eBay, and even Best Buy (though anyone who still buys from Best Buy should be put down. As a mercy) to no avail. I genuinely wanted to pay money for this thing, but it simply wasn't out there. But I found some 3rd party site hosting it. A movie that I bet one in 300,000 people haven't seen, and this website was hosting it.
That said, companies should make everything they have available for as cheap as possible. I'm not talking like iTunes cheap, because for seriously: most of that music isn't emotionally worth ten bucks. All their crap should be treated as a massive 24 hour clearing house: everything priced to move. I'm not talking renting a movie from YouTube for 4 bucks (way to sellout, Google. Oh, and we still get ads before our videos? Fantastic.), I'm talking about buying a video for 4 bucks. You want the newest Lady Gaga joint? 2 bucks. The biggest hurdle for many pirates is availability, the second pricing. Make the “legal” choice so free and easy that going to The Pirate Bay feels like a hassle.
You know all those TV shows you totally love? Like Malcolm in The Middle (get real. I'm the only one who likes that show) or Pirates of Dark Water? Or even the stuff you kind of want to forget about, like Skeleton Warriors or that stupid sitcom about cavemen. It's all sitting on some harddrive in some studio taking up space. What about all those amazing soundtracks you heard play in movies, like The Neverending Story or Sunshine or Return to Oz (you can tell what kind of consumer I am)? They're also collecting theoretical dust on some guy's hard drive. All this stuff should be out there for cheap. If the average consumer went to Amazon or iTunes and saw that with that 20 dollars they planned to spend on Transformers 3: The Criterion Collection, they could walk away with four soundtracks, a whole TV show, and a download of Inception, I guarantee that person'd spend 40. Good luck trying to convince that person to spend 40 (and only get 2 things, if they're lucky) where they had only planned to spend 20 (and get one thing).
I dunno. I got more to this. But I need food. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow and talk about how stupid it is to create physical items like they're supposed to be digital.
Monday, June 27, 2011
No more Looney Tunes
I really wanted to blog each episode of the Looney Tunes show. I really did. The problem(s) is(are) that 1. The show is so keenly unmemorable that it was difficult for me to hold the show in my head long enough to blog about. I haven't even watched the last three or four episodes – I'm not sure how many they're up to – but I have difficulty remembering the three I did see. You know why it's hard? Because nothing says funny quite like Yosemite Sam not firing a gun and being an irritating house guest. And something about a bitchy she rabbit. Speaking of which, did you see Bugs cross dress? Horrifying. Horrifying in the original? Not at all. In this one it is, but why? Namely it's because Bugs has been relegated to the position of your uncle, and not the creepy one. When your creepy uncle cross dresses, it's not that bad because he's already creepy, but when the uncle you like cross dresses you're forced to reassess the entire nature of you in relation to him. And it's not pretty. They made Bugs so humdrum and vanilla that anything just outside of normal is vastly unsettling. This would be like Roseanne doing anything.
2. The second reason I didn't/couldn't/wouldn't keep up with it is that I don't particularly enjoy reviewers who make their name reviewing crappy stuff. And there are a ton out there. And it's always the same with these guys: they act like they've been put on by an unkind universe or a sadistic boss and reviewing is the only recourse in life, so, “I'll do it, but I won't enjoy it.” And then they're snarky and it's a linguistic arms race as each reviewer races to come up with the best insult or colorful metaphor to describe how terrible their topic is, and by extension, their life. It's a tired routine, and I can't wait until the internet gets over it.
The point is that reviewing something you know is bad and then telling people why it's bad feels unnecessary. The real trick is reviewing something people assume is good (anything by Michael Bay or James Cameron of late) and telling them why, actually, it sucks. Perhaps there's some element of that in The Looney Tunes Show. There are people who labor under the mistaken notion that it's good, but I don't feel like the numbers justify it. I would be surprised if the show is still around in the fall.
2. The second reason I didn't/couldn't/wouldn't keep up with it is that I don't particularly enjoy reviewers who make their name reviewing crappy stuff. And there are a ton out there. And it's always the same with these guys: they act like they've been put on by an unkind universe or a sadistic boss and reviewing is the only recourse in life, so, “I'll do it, but I won't enjoy it.” And then they're snarky and it's a linguistic arms race as each reviewer races to come up with the best insult or colorful metaphor to describe how terrible their topic is, and by extension, their life. It's a tired routine, and I can't wait until the internet gets over it.
The point is that reviewing something you know is bad and then telling people why it's bad feels unnecessary. The real trick is reviewing something people assume is good (anything by Michael Bay or James Cameron of late) and telling them why, actually, it sucks. Perhaps there's some element of that in The Looney Tunes Show. There are people who labor under the mistaken notion that it's good, but I don't feel like the numbers justify it. I would be surprised if the show is still around in the fall.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
The Looney Tunes Show
The problem with The Looney Tunes show is that it's exactly as awful as you'd expect. It's so exactly awful, that it's actually really difficult to remember. I watched the premier this morning, and I know I watched it, but I can't tell you what it was about. I remember the plot: Bugs and Daffy are apparently closeted gay lovers (can't admit it to each other yet). Done. Oh wait, they also go on a game show called Besties, and I pretty much don't have to tell you the plot of the show. If you do, you're stupid and I hate you. They lose. Bugs has a gayfit because Daffy blah blah blah BOATS blah blah blah GAY GOPHERS blah blah blah MEXICAN MOUSE.
Jesus. The show's so damn predictable that I lose interest trying to tell someone else about it. There are just so many terrible flaws. The voices, the art, the animation, the music (my god. The music), the stories. It's overwhelming to know where to begin. Because this show is such a cluster, I think I'll talk about the problem with the concept.
Daffy and Bugs lop of their wangs and trade it for something that's the total opposite of genitals. What would that be, like, some kind of pottery? They've lopped off their junk and replaced it with the Pottery Barn. The thing about the Looney Tunes of yore is that they're elemental. They're not human: they're more like gods or archetypes. They descend into the world and screw it up. They don't get a house in the suburbs and order chinese, they descend into the suburbs and rip the shroud off, showing the flaccid beating heart of that world! By boxing the characters, you ruin them.
The producer says that his team distilled the characters into their core elements (apparently Bugs is a sensitive prima donna, and Daffy's just a dick bag) and inserted them into a “relevant” setting. Hup. There's that word. Whenever someone tells you he's making something relevant, punch him in the dingding, because what that really means is that he's going to sterilize and take away all the magic. Sure you could maybe say that the Looney Tunes crew has central characteristics – Bugs is crafty and Daffy is reactionary – but the second you try to make those characteristics relevant, you cut the nuts off. Sometimes Bugs is the aggressor, sometimes he's the victim, and sometimes he fuXX0rs with people just for the lulz. Same can be said for Daffy. He's not always the one doing the picking on, but he's always reactionary. But it doesn't always look the same. Remember that time Bugs got trapped in that Frankenstein castle? He was crafty in that he never quite got caught, and he always had a crack, but he didn't lay out some masterful plan.
I'm getting derailed. In the new cartoon, crafty for Bugs amounts to sitting around feeling superior, and then getting his feelings hurt when someone doesn't care about him. Reactionary for Daffy? He's just a bastard. And not even a funny one. The best part? The climax of the episode is a nice serious talk about our relationship. I wish I was fuckin' with ya. No. The Looney Tunes (whose prior involvement with feelings could be described as, “fuck feelings”) has Bugs tell Daffy, “I don't know why, but you're my best friend.” Schmaltzy music. If it were recorded before a live studio audience, they'd go “Awww,” Daffy says something snarky (and so rememberable that I totally forgot), and the audience would get in one last good guffaw.
Of course the animation is nothing less than sheer disappointment. I don't understand the purpose of the redesigns, especially since Bugs seems to be the only person affected. The voices are abysmal, except for possibly Daffy. Whoever's doing him really nailed it. They're all too deep, and the gay gophers, the two that used to argue about who gets to go first, are both too British and too deep. But seriously: the art is terrible. Remember that period in the early 90s when everything was excessively flat? That's this show's art. No more subtle coloring and painterly effects. There isn't even a single fast motion blur.
And the music. It's full of suck. Elmer Fudd sings a song about how bad he wants to bang a grill cheese sandwich.
Like, honestly, I wish I could keep talking about this show, but it's making me feel sick. Also, I'm having a hard time remembering it. But, in the future, when someone asks me, “Where were you when they killed art?” I can totally say, “Living room. The Looney Tunes show.”
Monday, January 17, 2011
A Slight Change
As much as I wish I blogged as much as I used to, the fact is that I don't think I ever will unless there is serious external motivation, whether that be money or community or free sandwiches. But I do wish I blogged more. To that end, I'm not going to keep track of my hours anymore on this blog. While it's not the hardest thing I've ever had to do, it was just enough work that it was just enough discouragement to prevent me from blogging. I'll still call the blog 10,000 hours, and I still plan on publishing some finished, or approximately finished stuff, I just have to figure out how I want to do that. Should I promise to publish X amount of things in X amount of time to create false obligation so that way I'll (probably) actually do it? And what kind of stuff should I publish?
And that's what I got for right now.
And that's what I got for right now.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
A Love for The Awful
This started out as an email to the author of an article I read on io9.com, being this one specifically: http://io9.com/5735228/we-are-in-a-golden-age-of-awful-television . At some point I figured I would be better off making huge rambling thing an actual blog entry and just emailing him the link. Much interest would be for him to respond, but I'm certain that anyone who contributes to a major blog gets so many useless spam and flame emails that their blood pumps binary.
first is that as surely as there is a golden age of TV, so also do TV and movies go hand in hand. the theatre seems interminably split between artistic, intellectual, thought provoking and moving and the mentally retarded. Few summers have there been where i could walk into the theater to see Where The Wild Things Are, and then walk out to buy a ticket to Transformers 2, Avatar (on rerelease), The Hangover, or any number of aborted attempts at quality movie making like Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans. I mean, you know this list. But crappy movies (and TV) have all existed, and it's not like this is really a new phenomena; Hollywood being built on the backs of terrible movies either suffocating good movies, or sometimes rarely helping a quality movie float to the top.
But here's what I don't get, the comment that made me want to email, and the true crime of the exchange between movie maker and movie goer: "Goofily enjoyable in a Hasselhoff-y type of way, maybe. But actually good? Not a chance." Why is it as consumers of entertainment we feel vindicated in watching terrible terrible entertainment, that we would readily admit is terrible, as long as we "didn't expect it to be good"? This is a phenomena I can't wrap my head around. My family loved Transformers 2, and in unflagging pavlovian fashion, they are the litmus for good movies: a "positive" result (they like it) means a terrible movie; a "negative" result means a good movie, and thus we see the purpose of the quotation's ironic use. Knowing it was bad (because I saw the first one, and moreover it's Michael Bay) I never saw it until Rifftrax put it in its proper place, and the magnitude of TF2's sin was staggering. So I started asking my friends who saw the movie, who willingly went to the theater, put down a crisp tenner (or more if you saw it in 3D) and was not embarrassed to say, "One for Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen at 11:30 please!" I was shocked to see how many people had! And these are educated people: engineers, artists, teachers, filmmakers and accountants and students. Some have children, so I can't fault them necessarily. But on more than one occasion I heard the following rationale: "Well, I wasn't anticipating Citizen Kane. I got what I expected and wasn't let down." As if there's a continuity of film: Citizen Kane at 10, and Michael Bay movies as some negative number in which it no longer looks like a number, and the only sin is indulging in anything between the extremes with one important caveat: that the offending movie be bad as you expected it. So at which point did this become a good rationale? 10 dollars is more than most people make per hour, and yet it's totally defensible to throw 10 dollars at something you find fulsome, as long as fulsome you expected.
It's not as if these movies are necessarily being watched ironically either. It's not us watching Adam West's Batman and taking a shot every time Robin says, "Holy (something) Batman!" or like we're watching Catwomen of Mars and making fun of it. No! This is us purposefully paying to see something we know isn't good, and then genuinely enjoying it because it isn't good, just like we predicted! Hooray! In other elements, this makes no sense. Are we going to buy and then subsequently enjoy Fred (from YouTube) Covers Big Mama Thornton and enjoy it because it's bad; not because we want to make fun of it, or because we want to own a piece of kitsch, but because we fully expect it to be bad and then will enjoy the experience because it was bad like we thought? Are we going to buy a bucket of questionable fried chicken from the local chicken joint, y'know, the one that's famous for giving people the runs, and then enjoy eating that chicken because it gave us the runs like we thought it would? Of course not. Now, food is a false corollary, but the point is that only with movies do we readily indulge in a subpar experience and then enjoy it because it turned out like we thought.
One excuse I often here, at least concerning TF2 (and other equally terrible movies have their equal defenses) is, "Well, all I wanted to see were giant robots fighting, and that's what I got, so I'm happy," which on its surface holds water. At the risk of sounding like judgmental buttmunch, however, I would have to say that this reasoning can only possibly hold for people who fall on a continuum of below average to average, at best. Or ideally it should. Consider the following: Mortal Kombat was a fantastic awful movie. Why? Because it stuck to the premise of the video game being, "An excuse for a bunch of weirdos to get together and beat the shit out of each other." The movie delivered on the weirdos, violence, and didn't alter the concept. A genuine ABC experience that's easy to summarize. Compared to TF2, things get weird. TF2 has the facade of being a movie about robots that beat each other up, but it quickly falls apart when you stop to consider that really only one of the robots has any kind of reliable characterization, the badguys are a blur of sameness, and then the movie aspires to something grand: an interstellar plot of ancient gods and ancient technology (and robot testicles). But the plot gets so muddy that things make no sense. Why Egypt exactly? How do we get to DC and then back again? Did Optimus just die three times in two movies? Did that robot just shit itself? Who the fuck is that? What am I seeing: knives in a blender? DID OPTIMUS JUST STRAIGHT MURDER ANOTHER ROBOT? I THINK I SEE THE SPASMODIC ENDING OF MY CHILDHOOD IN SPURTS GASHES AND GASPS!
My point is that MK succeeds because it has a paper thin conceit, but man does it stick to it like a kid covered in boogers sticks to a cartoon dog. Transformers flails all over employing the shotgun method to storywriting. In the minds of the viewer who "just wanted to see giant robots" story is meaningless. This means we have a medium based on story being allowed to succeed without story. TF2 isn't the only one: I saw those Twilight movies (RiffeTrax'd, as any good American should); Avatar had some pretty frown inducing plot holes; Clash of the Titans had a drive through in the back. A medium based on story being allowed to succeed by violating that simple dictate, and people are glad to hand their money over to encourage more awful storytelling to pass through their eyes.
Special effects does have a lot to do with it, but what about those people I mentioned before? Engineers working for Ball and animators at even a small animation firm aren't gobsmacked by simple FX; people who read Dovstoyesky for fun shouldn't be enthralled with such inept storytelling. Even people in the prime SFX demographic (like my family) who even admit that the 3D gives them headaches and that the fight scenes were impossible to decipher still think these shambling Frankenstein's monster style movies are passable, or even "The greatest incarnation of the Transformers to ever happen!"
I don't get it: why are so many people so predisposed to liking something awful? And it's not dumb people like I would have expected, but it's the artists and the engineers, the people who read Dovstoyesky and the people who struggle with the back of the cereal box.
first is that as surely as there is a golden age of TV, so also do TV and movies go hand in hand. the theatre seems interminably split between artistic, intellectual, thought provoking and moving and the mentally retarded. Few summers have there been where i could walk into the theater to see Where The Wild Things Are, and then walk out to buy a ticket to Transformers 2, Avatar (on rerelease), The Hangover, or any number of aborted attempts at quality movie making like Prince of Persia, Clash of the Titans. I mean, you know this list. But crappy movies (and TV) have all existed, and it's not like this is really a new phenomena; Hollywood being built on the backs of terrible movies either suffocating good movies, or sometimes rarely helping a quality movie float to the top.
But here's what I don't get, the comment that made me want to email, and the true crime of the exchange between movie maker and movie goer: "Goofily enjoyable in a Hasselhoff-y type of way, maybe. But actually good? Not a chance." Why is it as consumers of entertainment we feel vindicated in watching terrible terrible entertainment, that we would readily admit is terrible, as long as we "didn't expect it to be good"? This is a phenomena I can't wrap my head around. My family loved Transformers 2, and in unflagging pavlovian fashion, they are the litmus for good movies: a "positive" result (they like it) means a terrible movie; a "negative" result means a good movie, and thus we see the purpose of the quotation's ironic use. Knowing it was bad (because I saw the first one, and moreover it's Michael Bay) I never saw it until Rifftrax put it in its proper place, and the magnitude of TF2's sin was staggering. So I started asking my friends who saw the movie, who willingly went to the theater, put down a crisp tenner (or more if you saw it in 3D) and was not embarrassed to say, "One for Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen at 11:30 please!" I was shocked to see how many people had! And these are educated people: engineers, artists, teachers, filmmakers and accountants and students. Some have children, so I can't fault them necessarily. But on more than one occasion I heard the following rationale: "Well, I wasn't anticipating Citizen Kane. I got what I expected and wasn't let down." As if there's a continuity of film: Citizen Kane at 10, and Michael Bay movies as some negative number in which it no longer looks like a number, and the only sin is indulging in anything between the extremes with one important caveat: that the offending movie be bad as you expected it. So at which point did this become a good rationale? 10 dollars is more than most people make per hour, and yet it's totally defensible to throw 10 dollars at something you find fulsome, as long as fulsome you expected.
It's not as if these movies are necessarily being watched ironically either. It's not us watching Adam West's Batman and taking a shot every time Robin says, "Holy (something) Batman!" or like we're watching Catwomen of Mars and making fun of it. No! This is us purposefully paying to see something we know isn't good, and then genuinely enjoying it because it isn't good, just like we predicted! Hooray! In other elements, this makes no sense. Are we going to buy and then subsequently enjoy Fred (from YouTube) Covers Big Mama Thornton and enjoy it because it's bad; not because we want to make fun of it, or because we want to own a piece of kitsch, but because we fully expect it to be bad and then will enjoy the experience because it was bad like we thought? Are we going to buy a bucket of questionable fried chicken from the local chicken joint, y'know, the one that's famous for giving people the runs, and then enjoy eating that chicken because it gave us the runs like we thought it would? Of course not. Now, food is a false corollary, but the point is that only with movies do we readily indulge in a subpar experience and then enjoy it because it turned out like we thought.
One excuse I often here, at least concerning TF2 (and other equally terrible movies have their equal defenses) is, "Well, all I wanted to see were giant robots fighting, and that's what I got, so I'm happy," which on its surface holds water. At the risk of sounding like judgmental buttmunch, however, I would have to say that this reasoning can only possibly hold for people who fall on a continuum of below average to average, at best. Or ideally it should. Consider the following: Mortal Kombat was a fantastic awful movie. Why? Because it stuck to the premise of the video game being, "An excuse for a bunch of weirdos to get together and beat the shit out of each other." The movie delivered on the weirdos, violence, and didn't alter the concept. A genuine ABC experience that's easy to summarize. Compared to TF2, things get weird. TF2 has the facade of being a movie about robots that beat each other up, but it quickly falls apart when you stop to consider that really only one of the robots has any kind of reliable characterization, the badguys are a blur of sameness, and then the movie aspires to something grand: an interstellar plot of ancient gods and ancient technology (and robot testicles). But the plot gets so muddy that things make no sense. Why Egypt exactly? How do we get to DC and then back again? Did Optimus just die three times in two movies? Did that robot just shit itself? Who the fuck is that? What am I seeing: knives in a blender? DID OPTIMUS JUST STRAIGHT MURDER ANOTHER ROBOT? I THINK I SEE THE SPASMODIC ENDING OF MY CHILDHOOD IN SPURTS GASHES AND GASPS!
My point is that MK succeeds because it has a paper thin conceit, but man does it stick to it like a kid covered in boogers sticks to a cartoon dog. Transformers flails all over employing the shotgun method to storywriting. In the minds of the viewer who "just wanted to see giant robots" story is meaningless. This means we have a medium based on story being allowed to succeed without story. TF2 isn't the only one: I saw those Twilight movies (RiffeTrax'd, as any good American should); Avatar had some pretty frown inducing plot holes; Clash of the Titans had a drive through in the back. A medium based on story being allowed to succeed by violating that simple dictate, and people are glad to hand their money over to encourage more awful storytelling to pass through their eyes.
Special effects does have a lot to do with it, but what about those people I mentioned before? Engineers working for Ball and animators at even a small animation firm aren't gobsmacked by simple FX; people who read Dovstoyesky for fun shouldn't be enthralled with such inept storytelling. Even people in the prime SFX demographic (like my family) who even admit that the 3D gives them headaches and that the fight scenes were impossible to decipher still think these shambling Frankenstein's monster style movies are passable, or even "The greatest incarnation of the Transformers to ever happen!"
I don't get it: why are so many people so predisposed to liking something awful? And it's not dumb people like I would have expected, but it's the artists and the engineers, the people who read Dovstoyesky and the people who struggle with the back of the cereal box.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Ghostopolis
the problem with doug tennapel is that his christianity is strangling his storytelling. a section discussing the creation of ghostopolis reads something like this (not a direct quote; i don't have the book with me while i'm writing this):
some people say ghostopolis is only 6,000 years old, some say billions. hard to say because time isn't sequential in ghostopolis. all that can be said for sure is that a tuskegee airman, joe, built the entire place by himself: the mountains to make the bricks, the bricks to make the buildings. [dramatic close up zoom onto nail holes in joe's hands].
really, doug? i don't think we're actually talking about ghostopolis, are we? furthermore, i don't think tuskegee airman joe is really a tuskegee airman, is he? perhaps your lazy symbolism would have worked better if you put a sign around jesus' neck that reads "joe." er, strike that. reverse it.
beyond the lazy symbolism, tennapel goes out of his way to set up loose story threads so that the resolution can be extra syrupy. it can't just be about a boy who's lost faith in life, and the hardluck detective that rescues him. no. the boy's dead grandfather must also make up with the mother, the hardluck detective also learns how to be responsible, dies like how he wants (despite obvious discrepancies with the world's established physics), gets his girl, also the bad guy dies, but the boy gets to come back home AND learns there's a cure for his disease AND meets the ghost of his yet to be born child! the number of story threads doug unravels solely so he can provide a more saccharine ending is staggering, and makes for a wholly unsatisfying ending.
additionally, this book is done entirely digitally. doug's storytelling may be mildly retarded, but his art has always been unsurpassed. except here. i'm not sure of his motivation for making a digital book, but it doesn't benefit from digital brushes or digital coloring. instead of a standout black and white book that could turn heads, it ends up being indistinguishable from any other underachieving marvel or DC title.
i'm glad i didn't pay for it. i just got it from the library.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Alan Moore: Swamp Thing, Alan Moore's Writing for Comics
I finished Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Writing for Comics as the next couple items in my Moore stack. I don't really have a scheme or patter for choosing to read what I read and in the order I read it. Because the things I have to say about works are, unfortunately, short, I've combined the two books into one post. You can thank Apple's hopelessly useless Safari program for this double feature. Some misguided times I try to use the stupid thing, and it crashes without fail if I try to do more than one thing quickly. For example, browse the internet AND have the computer on, or go to a website and sneeze. I should always use firefox.
Swamp Thing I'd always avoided. I watched the cartoon a little bit as a kid and had a few of the toys, my favorite being the one that turned bad guacamole dark green when cold and good fresh guacamole green when hot, like in water or sunlight. I'd always preferred Marvel's Man-Thing, who was innately more ethereal and based in horror tales about demons and forest spirits and stuff. Man-Thing came first, and Swamp thing about a year later. I knew someone was stealing from someone. Ultimately, I guess it was DC who stole from Marvel.
As far as I know, Swamp Thing started out as a Science Gone Wrong vaguely environmental warning. A man, Alec Hammond, ends up getting reconstituted as plant matter through the combination of dirty swamp water, a secret chemical compound, and an explosion. I had no interest. When I read about a year of Alan Moore's take, where Swamp Thing becomes a sort of lesser spirit god, my interest was piqued. My guess is that that's something Moore builds on later, because it was mostly vacant in this book. This book did have a reinvention of his origin – instead of Alec Hammond simply becoming a thing made of old roots and leaves, he dies, and his soul (more or less, the book doesn't use these words) inhabits the roots, and with the aid of that special serum, a man shaped plant thing with the memories of a dead human comes into being. In this book he fights one lunatic who wants to destroy the world with plants, and a demon. The setup for forest god is easily forseeable.
Moore works in homages, as established in the last post. So I'm going to get that out of the way first: the second story involves a battle with a demon named Etrigan, a Jack Kirby creation, complete with a dedication to Jack at the end of the book. The art is also an homage to the old Creepy Comics style artwork: very scratchy, lots of lines. The art fits the book perfectly, and I stopped many times to admire the artists' (though I think the inks show better than pencils) skillful rendering of haunted plants. It really reminded me of Sam Kieth's run on Sandman.
As far as story is concerned, this one was much more straightforward than probably any other Moore book I've read. There wasn't a fleet of characters to remember, and they're introduced in small groups allowing you to easily file it away. Since Moore wasn't there since the start, there are a lot of en medias res characters that I had to build partial profiles for simply because I wasn't there from the start. The book really only has about five characters to keep track of, which is much easier than Tom Strong's ever growing cast, or Watchmen and League's ponderous casts.
I don't really have much else to say about this one. It didn't have as much Moore token weirdness, though I know he takes it in a progressively darker and inward direction. I don't even really know if this was worth typing because there weren't many Moore techniques I could mine or anything. I honestly found myself more routinely impressed by the art and less by the story. Maybe when I read following volumes I'll have more interesting things to report.
I was really looking forward to Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, but I was kind of disappointed. There's a series of perplex things happening with this book that I first want to address. The first is that it's almost five years old and it says volume one on the cover, and there is no sign of a volume 2 having ever existed in the history of ever. The only publication date listed in the book is 2006, but an afterword letter dated in 2003 references the work as being fifteen years old, which isn't inherently awful, but I feel in some way slighted Рlike the book was trying to deliberately keep the piece's age away from my attention. So apparently it was written in 1988 though nothing about the book's afterward and simple math belies that impression. Whatever.The next thing is the art. I'm not sure why it's there. Maybe so the reader doesn't forget that Alan Moore draws for the funny books? But that makes no sense because if you're reading this book, there's no way you don't know who Moore is. And the art's pretty awful. It's not awful in the Dirty-Hippy-At-ComiCon-Who-Tells-Me-I-Don't-Even-Have-To-Know-How-To-Draw-To-Make-Comics kind of awful, though his art is among the worst I've seen seek publication, but awful in the Art-Is-Such-Standard-Comic-Art-That-It-Almost-Feels-Like-It's-Making-Fun-Of-Itself kind of awful. And they have nothing to do with what Moore's talking about. It might be better if they in some way did, though I'm not sure how that'd work, but they're ridiculous. On page talking about pacing you have a gladiator in a little box, then in another page talking about the believability of the world there's a cartoon man being drug along on a leash by a cartoon dog in horrible generic clich̩ comic art. It's not even good. And it's so forgettable. The only art I remember is the very end which has a picture of a man and woman kissing, and it's only because I vowed I would remember one image by the end of the book, or my name wasn't whistling dixie, and I forgot until I got to that last image. It sucked like the rest.
The book itself wasn't all that hot either. I constantly felt like Moore was gearing up to tell me something amazing, but never quite got there. That might be the same sort of thing as Swamp Thing (whose art was AWESOME) wherein it's merely the first volume. Supposedly. Unfortunately, whereas Swamp Thing got to go on with more volumes, it appears Writing for Comics did not. Most of what Moore said are things that I internalized long ago. Maybe if someone who hasn't had as many writing classes as I had, or who hasn't been reading comics as long as I have, or someone who pays less attention than I had read this book they would have thought it was amazing. But a lot of felt like rehash. Which I wasn't anticipating. Moore tells us on the first page he doesn't want the book to be a “How To Write Like Alan Moore” tutorial, which isn't want I wanted, but I suppose I expected something a bit more exploratory than this books alloted forty pages. I was honestly expecting a novel when I ordered this book from the library.
Some of the things I had already internalized that Moore mentioned were things like making sure you realize what you're doing; everything has a purpose and when you break from that purpose, make sure you know why you're doing it. There were even some things that I know, but he worded in ways that made it a little more succinct in my mind (which was cool). For example, he said there's a different between story and plot. Story seems to be a larger more nebulous concept. In the literary world, it would be called theme. It's the thing that connects this particular story, or plot, to humanity at large. And even if you're dealing with something silly, like elves, makes it relevant to the human condition. Plot is the particular sequence of events in that story. To use a familiar example, Finding Nemo is a story about the nature of father-son relationships, whereas its plot would be about a little boy fish getting lost in the ocean and his dad trying to find him.
Another thing Moore talked about was scale. His advice was to imagine the large details of a story and progressively work towards the most exact details until all of a sudden, you have a story. Start with the world: the time, where it's located, all the factors that went into the world. What's it's political climate? Is there a war? What events happened in the past to form the current world? Is it a totalitarian world? Is it primitive? Do they love TV? On and on. He says this is the most time consuming part of story creation, but makes the rest go smooth and comparatively faster.
Next, you'd develop your characters: everything about them and how they fit into this larger scope around them. From there, the plot is essentially the natural expression of the world and characters over time. In my book I wrote that P=(W*C)/T. Moore's advice is to think of plot like a four-dimensional construct, where the fourth dimension as time: each panel or situation is a single 3D slice operating within a 4D construct. His writing about plot was the most informative and enjoyable of the book.
In a 40 page book I only took a page of notes. Which is not a very good rate. My sincere hope is that he visits this concept later with more information. Then it might not suck so bad. I guess we'll see.
Alan Moore's Writing: Tom Strong
As I mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I'm trying to work through Alan Moore's entire corpus, or what of it I can get my hands on, before school starts in the interest of trying to absorb Moore's writing into my own. I thought a wise element of that would be to, on this blog, try to dissect some of Moore's tools hopefully distilling his craft into an ingestible tonic that will grant spirit powers. In the spirit of that, I just finished Tom Strong volume 1, the Deluxe Edition. A couple brief observations:
It's twelve issues long.
The issues appear denser than, say, a standard offering from DC or marvel.
Published by America's Best Comics, Moore's own line, which I think is distributed through DC.
Despite the fact that I really really dislike DC, I love their off-the-beaten-path stuff, like America's Best (of which I've also read portions of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Top 10) and I've never read a Vertigo comic I didn't like, most of which I loved. I don't know what it is about those English comic writers, but they are some clever and unabashed mothers.
So Tom Strong is kind of like Superman brought about through Batman means: he's incredibly strong, slow aging, and uncannily resilient, but it's mostly thanks to a special regimen of diet (slightly magical) and exercise. He protects a city called Millenium City from its many would be adversaries with the help of his wife, daughter, and talking gorilla friend. It's very much modeled after and feels like old comics. Which is actually the first Moore device I wanted to address.
Most of the issues in this first bound edition feature what Moore calls Untold Tales, which is a flashback into Strong's deep past (being 100 years old, it's extensive), the art and narration reflecting an appropriate comic genre. Moore is really big on homage. V for Vendetta was built up on a lot of literary and cultural allusions, V himself being derived directly from a significant part of England's history, and Top 10 is essentially a big love letter to a half century of superhero books with all the tropes and easily recognizable characters and situations. More on Top 10 some other time.
Tom strong lapses into a sort of Archie style whenever the comic focuses on Strongmen of America (his fanclub) number 2059, but the rest of the present stories have a very classic comic look. The coloring is very smart: the characters look very much like cartoons. In fact, one of the homage pieces is even in a mock Disney style.
The first flashback's style I don't totally understand. It takes place in WWII Germany, but nothing about the style looks Golden Age. In fact it looks very 90s, and it's even difficult to say why. It has a vaguely Joe Madureira or Humberto Ramos look to it, which might be why. Both artists gained prominence in the late 90s, and all the women are ridiculously out of proportion (90s comic tradition), which isn't in keeping with the bulk of the art. It definitely has a 90s feel, but I don't know why a WWII story is reflected. I'm stumped on this one. As near as I can figure, it might be an homage to some Captain America retooling that happened around this time, but apart from WWII there's nothing to really make you think of the Cap himself.
The second one is easy. Strong and wife Dhalua fall backwards in time and meet a giant creature composed of millions of algae cells that mimics both the biology and psychology of its prey, but living on Pangaea, before there were even reptiles, Strong and wife are the first chance it's had to mimic complex biology or physiology. A fight ensues, and Strong escapes safely. The art is definitely done in a Tales of Suspense faux-Scifi/horror art style, complete with a total lack of though bubbles, and every word being spoken outloud. Most sentences end with an exclamation point. The art looks very comic book, and is probably the style that comes to people's minds when they hear comic book.
The next homage is a flashback to a Riddler type character that likes to kill the hero in complex Rube Goldberg situations. The art is pure Detective Comics. I wish this one had gone a little further, losing the modern six color process and adopting a more era appropriate three color process. Things look too vibrant for a comic mimicking a nearly 80 year old style.
There are other homages – western, Disney, and horror included, complete with Lovecraftian scratchy pen renderings, and narration that's contained entirely within paragraphs, more like an illustrated book than a comic. That one was the most striking as it presented the greatest deviation from the art. Tom looked a little stupid and out of place though, as his rendering wasn't as scratchy, but with everything else looking so victorian and rough, almost like a woodcut, he looked cartoony and ridiculous. And of course there's a Kirby homage. If you have the words Comic and Homage in a single sentence, it will invariably include Kirby. Kirby is to comics what Jesus was to religion. Just saying.
So apart from very careful homages makes Tom Strong worth reading? Well, at first glance, not a lot. At first glance.
The comic feels like it tries to start both en medias res and at the beginning, as if after having heard of Superman your whole childhood you decided to read his first issue. It almost feels like as if on a meta level, the reader is expected to already have knowledge of the person contained within the comics, which is sort of what's happening. The first issue is a split between 2059 (referenced above) reading his comic initiating him into Strongmen of America, and the comic he's reading: Tom Strong's origin. A clever device, but it makes getting into the book a bitch. If I wasn't turning Moore's writing into a project, I would have put the book up. And I did. I first tried reading this book about a year ago. I should have known then to push through, because honestly, when has a Moore book let you down? Never is the correct answer.
Nevertheless, I hate it when books just open up by throwing names and places at you. Few things make me want to learn about them less than having to keep track of names of people and places before I'm given a reason to care about them. Watchmen was expert in that way: it revealed a character at a time, peeling back the layers of characterization back like an onion. It opened with an exciting murder scene, which gives you the incentive of learning about who these characters are.
Another thing that made the book difficult is that the first two issues feature barely any Tom Strong. The first book features him only in exposition inside the comic in a comic, while the second one features his daughter, Tesla, and his Gorilla, Solomon, trying to understand this bizarre machine symbiote. He only shows up at the end to deliver a spoonful of Deus Ex Machina. Related to this is the fact that we watch his supposed greatest nemesis die in a single panel without seeing any of the conflict or who his villain is. By the time I got to issue three, I was using lots of will power to get through it. I wasn't even sure if this comic had real characters, but like any Moore comic, he starts to administer hook after hook and there's no getting free.
It's hard to say how Moore did it, but by issue four when we meet Strong's opposite in gender and philosophy, I felt like I knew how Strong would react to situations, the kind of character he was even though the amount of character revealing dialog is kept to a strict minimum. The third chapter about space faring dimension hopping Aztecs with a quantum computer bound Quetzalcoatl had me hooked enough to get through to the fourth chapter, and then the book really started to gain altitude.
I think Moore depends on what we as the reader know of superhero archetypes to fill in Strong's character. In many ways the character is himself a cypher. He rarely does anything that seems unique to him, but seems in many ways generic, as if the compulsion to read doesn't emerge from Strong as a character, but Strong's universe, which I suspect a vehicle for Moore to tell us a little about how he thinks time, the world, and the universe(es) are structured. And in that regard, the book is successful.
Strong himself though acts as Superman would, and has a lot of Batman's characteristics, such as the reliance on wit and technology. But he's willing to go a step further: he kills his arch nemesis. Strong is benevolent to a fault even relocating a self replicating machine that was eating the planet to reproduce itself to Venus where it would be free to replicate without impinging on other life. Strong seems to recognize when someone is a villain simply because of a clashing world view, and when someone is malevolent and needs putting down, as in the case of his nemesis. This draws attention to Superman and Batman's own failings to do the same. Yet, Strong isn't tortured by it. He simply recognizes what needs to happen and does it, but reserves killing for the absolute final solution.
Also interesting is that he's Earth's (or Millenium City's) ace in the hole: there are no other super heroes that we see, only Strong, yet apart from the introductory issue, he doesn't meddle in the small scale stuff. Being significantly weaker than Superman (though he could probably take Batman), he only really deals with stuff that is threatening on a planetary or often larger scale.
This whole idea of a character that is defined by what the audience knows is a double edged sword: ultimately the character himself doesn't matter resulting in a character medium that's totally driven by concepts. That part I like: it's experimental and risky, and Moore's ideas are immaculate. On the other hand, the character is ultimately meaningless. There's absolutely no tension worrying if the character will live or not, because he's not the point. The point is seeing where the situation will take him. In a way, he's more like a spiritual force, like Jesus; something that enters into the world and whose actions unlock real potential around him, but being spirit, he himself isn't ever in genuine danger. I never once found myself worrying that Strong would die, but rather instead wanted to see what idea Moore was going to show me next. But honestly, when was the last time you read a superhero comic and actually worried that the hero would die? Never. Even when they actually die (see: Superman (4 times?), Captain America, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Spider-Man), the tension that they'll stay that way is near zero. Moore knows that, and he expects the reader to know it too.
At least that's my working hypothesis.
This Post: 60 Total: 145/600,000 Minutes
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