The Way of the Chisa Fist

Chisa's Best Music Picks of 2011

2012-01-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

TOP ALBUMS OF 2011

Com Truise - Galactic Melt

The impenetrable genre once known as "IDM" (Intelligent Dance Music) has in recent years given way to far more accessible electronic forms such as dubstep, nu-disco and dance-punk. Whether or not ths is a step in the right direction is debatable, but it does have the benefit of bringing into the spotlight a form of music which was formerly, at best, the purview of ecstasy-fueled neo-hippies, and at worst an elitist enclave of overprotective aficionados. Into this fragmented cultural landscape steps Seth Haley, aka Com Truise, an upstart from New Jersey whose retro-inspired tunes, heavy with vintage synthesizer sounds and heavy drum machine loops, harken back to such 80s producers as Paul Hardcastle, Harold Faltermeyer and Sylvester Levay. The future never sounded so deliciously familiar.

Breakout track: "Futureworld"

Cults - Cults

In the shadow of its older brother The 80s, the 90s barely had a chance to stay relevent and cool, and to be fair, such awful mis-steps as Marilyn Manson, Green Day and the Spice Girls illustrate why. Yet the 90s were also filled with incredible sounds, from the emerging landscape of electronica, to the reworking of R&B into new jack swing, to the indie rock scene that spawned Wilco and The Flaming Lips. Carrying the torch for the latter contingent is Cults, a lovely little duo from Manhattan that fuses the dream pop sensibilities of The Cranes and Slowdive with a jaunty 60s flavored vibe that would make Tommy James and the Shondells flash a thumbs up of approval. Fun, romantic music for the prom you never went to.

Breakout track: "Walk At Night"

Cut Copy - Zonoscope

We've known Australia in many musical forms over the history of pop music, from Olivia Newton-John to Men At Work to INXS to Wolfmother. Cut Copy is like all of those examples thrown together in a cuisinart and set to puree: deliciously smooth, containing a plethora of familiar flavors, yet with a unique taste all its own. This is unapologetic pop music, to be sure, with all the affectations of that wide-spanning genre. But something new and exciting is here as well, which shines through in a hopeful wash of major chords and harmonizing vocals, akin to an old Beach Boys record or one of the less-distasteful boy bands of the Justin Timberlake era, with just a hint of Sun Ra's Egyptian sensbilities and a dash of The Cure's perennial heartache.

Breakout track: "Sun God"

Friendly Fires - Pala

I want to smack people who say there's no good music anymore. Perhaps in the majority of cases it requires a bit of dilligent searching, but how do you explain a band like Friendly Fires? With a vocalist like a shaman calling the masses to ritual and overwhelming tribal beats that pummel the dancefloor into submission, you'd have to be a damned fool to claim their sound is either hard to find or of sub-par quality. This sophmore album is anything but sophomoric; continuing the motif begun with their self-titled debut from 2008, the boys from Hertfordshire do not fail to deliver the unique mashup of alternative rock, disco funk and Cuban salsa that launched such tracks as "Kiss of Life" into the global spotlight.

Breakout track: "Show Me Lights"

Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place

Like a Dead Can Dance record played through a rotary speaker in the Grand Canyon, this debut record from Louisiana born ambient artist Julianna Barwick is seductively far-sounding, slightly unnerving, and achingly feminine. No mere New Age album, the loping repititions of heavily reverbed drone vocals and sporadic punctuating piano and rhythm quotes are like songs trapped in amber and preserved for millions of years, a ghostly reminiscence of sounds past reaching sorrowfully into the present. This is dream music in the truest sense of that descriptor, a buffet of gossamer tones like acrylics on a palette, which Barwick fluidly wields with all the grace, simplicity and charm of an episode of Bob Ross's "Joy of Painting."

Breakout track: "Envelop"

M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

It was a good year for synthpop: the mainstream success of La Roux, the return of Thomas Dolby, the proliferation of chillwave artists like Nite Jewel, Small Black and Ariel Pink. It seems a perfect time for this ambitious double-album from M83, a decade after an eponymous debut brought French producer Anthony Gonzalez to the attention of the music world. Flawlessly melding electronic music with shoegazer (and favoring the latter heavily), this album is neither an abstract soundscape of ambient noodlings like Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Volume 2" nor a concept album with a cohesive narrative like The Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness", but manages to straddle a particular and refreshing line dead center of those two artistic cliches.

Breakout track: "Wait"

Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'

I first heard Raphael Saadiq in a Payless store in the early 2000s, which would have been a forgettable instance if not for my shoe seeking friend craning her head towards the speaker and remarking: "Is that a tuba?" Saadiq has picked up the ball dropped by post-"Voodoo" D'Angelo, taking neo-soul into strange new territory with a definite sense of humor and a sincerity hardly seen in modern R&B's overproduced, materialistic landscape. "Stone Rollin'" sounds like authentic vintage Motown, right down to the instrumentation, background singers and chord progressions; one almost expects their iTunes files to have skips and scratches from overplaying the groove -- and you will be overplaying it, jack. Raphael, you so crazy.

Breakout track: "Good Man"

Snowman - Absence

When's the last time you heard a truly weird record? In a post-modern age of music where Skrillex and Lady Gaga share radio airtime, and a member of the Goodie Mob can make the Billboard top ten with a song literally titled "Fuck You", the modifier seems irrelevant. But weirdness is a subtle beast; the harder you try for it, the faster you end up back at pathetically normal. Accidentally falling into the spookiest record of 2011 (which, as the reviews of Julianna Barwick and M83 show, is a close race), Snowman's heavily reverbed vocals, syncopated rhythmic idiosyncracies and unexpected song structures come off like a collaberation between Tool and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, composing a soundtrack for a sequel to Pan's Labyrith on the Day of the Dead. Haunting, beautiful, and downright solid.

Breakout track: "Hyena"

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

For ten years, Canadian sound artst Tim Hecker has been crafting sweeping vistas of nonsound far removed from the usual ilk of ambient and drone artists; his pieces always have a certain unease to them, a barely-contained dystrophy of distortion constantly raging just beneath a soft, controlled surface, like a Cover Girl with a facial tic. This 2011 offering is no different from his usual form, a trio of multi-track suites accented by several unrelated singles, each conveying a compression wave of alternating anxiety and relaxation through massive amounts of overdrive, tremolo, and sound stacking. You might be tempted to use this to fall asleep to, but like similar somnabulistic aids, Hecker's work will certainly leave you with unexpected aftereffects.

Breakout track: "Analog Paralysis, 1978"

Washed Out - Within And Without

Damn it, The Postal Service, see what you did now? Here all us electronic artists were, content to sit in out bedrooms trying to be the next Autechre, and you come along with your girly vocals about breakups over argeggios and SP1200 drum machine beats, and suddenly Owl City is on the radio everywhere. It's getting so bad that even the Deep South is chiming in! Hailing from Perry, Georgia is one Ernest Greene, the one-man band known as Washed Out, poised to take over the entire realm of pop music with his quirky lo-fi chillwave tunes that are as at home in ten-dollar mixtape headphones as they are in a Russian discotheque. Of all the 80s revivalism going on right now, Washed Out is far ahead of the pack; expect to see this cat blow up faster than anyone expects.

Breakout track: "Amor Fati"

HOT SINGLES

Carl Finlow, "Restless"

Straight-up club song reminiscent of classic Juan Atkins. You'd never know it's title, but you'd always recognize it when it came on.

The Chain Gang of 1974, "Hold On"

Cuts the difference between Cut Copy's loping electropop and Friendly Fires' agitated disco-funk, rather deftly and magically in fact.

Christ., "The BMX Kid"
<a href="http://awkwardsilencerecordings.bandcamp.com/track/christ-the-bmx-kid">Christ. - The BMX Kid by Awkward Silence Recordings</a>
Ex-member of Boards of Canada carries the torch for the surprisingly absent band. 1970s synths, 1990s hip hop beats, pure 2010s aesthetic.

Florence + the Machine, "Spectrum"

I was almost ready to give up on the "Ceremonials" album three-quarters through. And then this ass-kicking son-of-a-bitch came on and my face was wet with tears.

Kooley High, "Skyview"

I also want to smack people who say there's no real hip hop anymore. Like a Main Source apertif with a Pharcyde chaser.

Kreayshawn, "Gucci Gucci"

If you weren't bumping this song in your ride in the summer of 2011, you were living in a cave. Awesome just for the line "bitch you ain't no Barbie, I see you work at Arby's / number 2, super sized, hurry up I'm starving".

Neon Indian, "Era Extraña"

A close contender for Washed Out's total dominion over chillwave. Imagine a John Hughes movie soundtrack covered by Toto, then remixed by Freescha.

Scorn, "Shake Hands"

When I heard Scorn was making dubstep now, I hid under my bed in sheer panic. Not so much music as audio carpet bombing.

St. Vincent, "Chloe in the Afternoon"

The soundtrack from a cybernetic strip club. Oppressively seductive, with a growling bass groove like a panther that swallowed a belt sander.

Tom Waits, "Bad As Me"

It's almost unfair to include Tom Waits in any best-of list; he never truly releases a bad song. This raw, rabble-rousing crier is Waits at his most Waits-y, an off-kilter roadhouse jukebox 45 by a Bizarro Lou Bega.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Amplifier - Fractal
Bibio - Mind Bokeh
Ceephax Acid Crew - United Acid Emirates
Destroyer - Kaputt
Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!
Infinite Scale - Ekko Location
Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow
Metronomy - The English Riviera
Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Luminaries & Synastry
Nite Jewel - It Goes Through Your Head

Doctor Who Villain Rulebook

2011-10-14T08:53:00.001-07:00

The Doctor lies. There is no reason for me to take the moral high ground in this regard. I too will lie, particularly during the bit when I am telling him my master plan. He's just going to figure it out anyway, I'm damn well not going to make it easy for him.
Should the Doctor give me the chance to renounce my evil ways (and he will) I will take him up on the offer, apologizing to all those I have oppressed and vowing to make amends. Then, when he gets in his TARDIS and leaves, I will go immediately back to whatever I was doing before he showed up.
If it becomes necessary to kill the Doctor, I will do so without hesitation. Preferably using some method that does not favor regeneration, such as charring him into ash with flamethrowers or dropping a piano on him.
If it becomes necessary to kill the Doctor's companions, I will do so without hesitation. They're more competent than they look, and if he does end up defeating me at least I'll be able to rub that in his face before I go down.
I will not let the Doctor talk.
I will not let the Doctor press buttons. Ideally I will not have any buttons that he can press in the first place. In a universe with voice print identification and bio-recognition software there's no excuse for getting defeated because the Doctor guessed your password.
Jobs done by biological henchmen will require a robot partner, and vice versa. This will act as a check and balance against the Doctor's usual tactics: the robot cannot be persuaded to join the Doctor's cause via ethical debate, and the organic cannot be overridden by technical means. This policy will be in effect over all employment grades, including guard duty, administration, and my personal harem.
I will invest in Deadlock Seals for absolutely everything. If I can afford a doomsday device, I can afford not to skimp on security. This includes the access panels on all the robots. Especially the robots in the harem.
I will never, ever, ever imprison the Doctor and his companions in the same cell block, let alone the same cell.
I will not imprison the Doctor in anything with a door. I will instead keep him in a 50-foot pit.
My minions, henchmen, and administrators will not have identification cards or lanyards. Anyone attempting to gain access to anywhere but the cafeteria or the restrooms using a paper ID will be thrown into the 50-foot pit.
I will not try to out-science the Doctor. That never works and is utterly futile. Instead, I will keep on hand a variety of extremely low-tech alternatives for defeating him, such as a phalanx of archers wielding poison-tipped arrows, so that when he disables all of my technology I am not completely vulnerable.
I will not try to steal the TARDIS for it's technology. It's tempting, but I already have a doomsday device that I know how to use and there's no point crossing horses in mid-stream. Eyes on the prize. I will, however, have it couriered to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and dumped there. I will also keep on hand a number of standard British police boxes in random locations just to mess with him.
I will not form an alliance with the Daleks or the Cybermen just to defeat the Doctor. First, that's a tremendously stupid idea in general, and second, just look at their track record against him.
If possible, I will invest in a Raston Warrior Robot. Not even the Doctor ever beat that son of a bitch.
I will not let River Song kiss me under any circumstances.
If for some reason I am compelled to make a dramatic speech to the Doctor at some point, I will not bother trying to justify my actions or equivocating whatever horrendous things he has done. Those are rhetorical devices and I am above such petty bickering. Instead I will keep to the facts, pointing out that he always shows up uninvited and pokes his nose in other people's business and that's just plain inconsiderate and unwarranted.
Should I at some point capture the Doctor, he will be required to undergo the same thorough screenings as anyone boarding a standard commercial flight. Specifially, I will confiscate any and all items on his person that can be used as clever weapons. Which pretty much means any and all items on his person. Including his clothing. Especially his clothing. Especially if he is wearing a scarf.
At least one of my "advisers" will be someone who speaks in complete gibberish, to make the Doctor think his TARDIS translation function is on the fritz.
I will have an escape plan in case the Doctor defeats me. I am not an idiot. Putting all my eggs in one basket is just plain stupid.

(Yes, of course it was inspired by the Evil Overlord List.)

Chisa's Answers to The 20 Craziest Job Interview Questions

2011-07-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/poweryourfuture/20-craziest-job-interview-questions-2497002/

Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.

I already did, and you may also find that I have already replaced invisible money into your bank account as well.

Facebook: Twenty-five racehorses, no stopwatch, five tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.

This is one of those trick questions to see if I'm going to blow all my money on lottery tickets or something, isn't it?

Citigroup: What is your strategy at table tennis?

My strategy at table tennis, which everyone who is not an alien probe sent to scout on our species' homeworld for possible invasion calls “ping pong”, is to be as far away from anyone that plays table tennis as possible. Really, if you have ping pong balls in your house in 2011 and they're not for beer pong or some kind of arts and crafts reason like making a Dalek cosplay outfit for your poodle, there's something seriously off about you.

Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?

There is only one distinct way to climb a staircase: upwards. You're not trying very hard, Google. I saw that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation too.

Capital One: How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?

Dude, it's not like we're talking about the debt ceiling or gay marriage here. These people make hoagies. Get a little perspective for chrissakes.

Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?

That ratio is determined by the Hendricks Equation: the number of possible drunks divided by the number of possible bars, minus the subgroup of likely heterosexual males, times the average number of boxes per stockroom, times the average number of umbrellas per box. Most conservative estimates place the number somewhere around fourteen bajillion.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers.

Seems a little early in the game for us to be discussing your sexual harassment policies.

Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?

By what definition of “identical” can one ball be CLEARLY NOT identical to the other seven? This is how you people fucked us in the 2008 financial crisis, isn't it?

Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.

I'm pretty much just not answering this one. I'm sorry, but really.

Lubin Lawrence: If you could describe Hershey, Godiva and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?

I went to Milton Hershey boarding school for six years, a private institution founded by the chocolate magnate himself. It's a beautiful, arboreal place, akin to Plato's olive tree pocked Academy, where bright, hopeful, intelligent young people are sent so that they may one day become broken adults. I'm sorry, what was the question?

Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?

In what possible universe do I have access to a genie and still have to hold down a job? You suck at world building, ma'am.

Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?

Up until age 12, I would use a variety of materials such as construction paper, wood glue, and permanent markers to compose elaborate pieces of art by which I could explore the universe in a diorama of my own creation, to stave off the lonesomeness of being an only child from a single parent family and the destitution of having no toys of my own due to our abject poverty. From age 12 onwards, my penis.

VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.

“Check out this all-metal club you can beat your neighbors with! Much better than conventional wood!”

Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?

I'd leave, because he's totally right, and also screaming at me, which I find unpleasant.

Brown & Brown Insurance: How would you rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?

10! Total 10, every single goddamn day. I live the greatest adventure. I am Tosk.

Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1’s and 0’s?

Oh, easy. 11100001. That's 225 in binary.

UBS: If we were playing Russian roulette and had one bullet, I randomly spun the chamber and fired but nothing was fired. Would you rather fire the gun again or respin the chamber and then fire on your turn?

Well, logically, it makes more sense to respin the chamber seeing as that gives you a one in six chance of getting the bullet instead of a one in five... you know what, nevermind. This interview is over.

Merrill Lynch: Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.

I'm pretty sure I already went over this one with the Kiewit Corp guy.

Susquehanna International Group: Five guys, all of different ages, enter a bar and take a seat at a round table. What is the probability that they are seated in ascending order of age?

There's no possibility, seeing as it's a round table. Next time use a linear table.

Dear Steampunk

2011-07-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Please stop putting goggles on top of your top hat. It looks idiotic and there is no functional way for you to use your goggles in that manner. What, the top hat or the goggles wasn't quirky enough?

Sincerely,
Chisa

Luke Skywalker, Alchemist: the Star Wars Trilogy as Magnum Opus

2011-06-22T20:04:00.001-07:00

Last week I was talking to Chronkite about cinematography and how it's often used to draw the viewer into a state the director wants to effect. There are many ways that this can be accomplished (the Kuleshov Effect comes immediately to mind), but the example I used was the reveal of Luke's green lightsaber in Return of the Jedi. Until this point in the third movie, lightsabers are either blue or red: Darth Vader wields a red one, and Ben Kenobi and Luke (using his father's) wield blue ones. This is important not because of the colors or even the visual implication of good versus evil, but because it sets up Luke for two movies visually in the subconscious.

Thus when the green lightsaber is first activated, it short-circuits six years of the viewer's expectations about how the Star Wars universe works, and it does so brilliantly. We know everything that's going to happen in the scene; in fact the setup is so visually and musically languorous that even a child knows that Luke's about to wreck shop on Jabba's lackeys. But what they don't know is that Luke is a different kind of Jedi. The green lightsaber represents a third choice, and that's why the scene is so exciting even though we know exactly what's coming.

What is that third choice? Alchemy.

At the beginning of the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, the galaxy is run almost entirely by the Empire. The Empire represents science and reason as a superior force. Darth Vader is mostly robotic, sucking oxygen loudly through a life support system and speaking through a metallic speaker box. The Empire is literally and metaphorically mechanized: legions of Stormtroopers, waves of star fighters, immense battle cruisers, and a planet-sized monolithic Death Star as the final culmination of their technical prowess, represented as a perfect sphere, the most elegant and primordial of the natural shapes.

We're soon told that things weren't always this way: there used to be a group of cool bros called the Jedi who took care of things for a thousand years. The Jedi represent religion as a superior force, so much so that the 'god' they put their faith in is literally called The Force. They were wiped out by the Empire in what essentially amounts to an intergalactic zerg rush: mechanization producing superior numbers. The Empire is the Walmart to the Jedi's mom and pop store. Quantity overtakes quality; assembly-line sweatshops put craftsmanship out of business. (This is all expounded later in the prequels, but let's leave those be for now.)

We therefore have the classic struggle of science versus religion as the set-up for the entire Star Wars universe. But there's a third option: the Rebel Alliance. The Alliance represents alchemy as a superior force.

Many people misunderstand alchemy as something akin to either pseudoscience or a strange mystic cult, which shows you how effective science and religion have been at both suppressing it and consuming it into their binary scheme. Alchemy in this case means the authority of the individual. In the dichotomy of religion versus science, authority is always placed outside the body. Religion insists that truth is unknowable and thus man must default to God's will. Science, in contrast, insists that truth is knowable only through observation and detachment. In both cases truth is impersonal and separated from the experience of the individual. Alchemy says: fuck that noise, the truth was always inside you. You know the truth already, and that empowers you to be your own authority. Rules are not laws, they are merely good ideas, and you can come up with those on your own.

Of course, this is a gross threat to all those who need people dependent on externalized authority to retain money and power, which is why we're taught from the earliest age to depend on the authorities outside us. It doesn't matter that those authorities conflict with one another, that school and church teach you drastically different methods. In fact, that confusion serves to amplify the real lesson, on which both church and school (as well as politics, commerce, and art) agree wholeheartedly and with crystal clarity: to make you believe that you don't know what you're doing. It's no coincidence that fire-breathing fundamentalist Christians and hardcore conservative Republicans always find themselves at the same dinner table come election time, nor that the liberal and social elements of government always tag team with academia and celebrities. Whether the subject is fiscal policy, international relations, education, separation of church and state, medicine, entertainment or anything else, these players all push the same agenda: you need them to tell you what to do.

Now we introduce Luke. Luke's kind of a dumb regular kid. He doesn't like the Empire (who does? They're dicks!) but he's willing to go to the Academy nevertheless, because anything's better than being stuck on Tatooine (an interesting situation in light of military recruitment tactics in the real world, where you can simply substitute “US government” for “Empire” and “Flint, Michigan” for “Tatooine” and get the same result). We can tell Luke's kind of different from his friends and his adoptive parents. He has a fire in his belly, a wanderlust. He doesn't know exactly what he's supposed to be doing, but he knows it's sure as shit not this. That's the athenor burning in Luke's belly, the alchemical furnace. The message that primal urge is telling Luke is one of life's most important lessons: “You know how it seems like everyone else is just as full of shit as you are? Well, guess what, they are. So you may as well go your own way.”

It's not long before Luke gets his window of opportunity. Fate has a way of finding those meant for the path of alchemy, because, as we'll see, fate is not the enemy of free will, but it's ally – but let's not get ahead of ourselves. In any case, events lead Luke to the house of Ben Kenobi, who gives him his first real choice: to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a Jedi. Here Luke begins to understand the nature of authority and choice, but he still has a long way to go. He hasn't chosen his own path yet, he's merely become aware of the possibility of choice – and finally given one, jumps headlong into it.

In a matter of hours Luke's life turns entirely upside-down. Once a farmboy with only the eventual promise of the Imperial Academy to look forward to, Luke is now consorting with ancient warrior-prophets, cool dude smugglers, crazy-ass aliens and beautiful princesses. He's definitely knee-deep in The Shit, too (literally, at one point), but the ride is so balls-out awesome that the severity of his actions seem lost on him for the moment. Luke is heady on vertigo like a child on a roller coaster.

And then the inevitable strychnine crash from this acid trip euphoria happens: Ben gets murdered right in front of him. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. For the first time, Luke has doubt about The Force and the path of the Jedi Knight. Hell, if Obi-Wan Kenobi can be taken down, what hope does a backwater shmuck like Luke have?

But even in his moment of crushing despair and confusion, the voice of his first mentor calls to him, echoing that fire in his belly, that driving urge that set him on the path to alchemy, that fiercest and most primal of animal actions: Run, Luke! RUN!

Luke runs, and he doesn't stop running for a movie and a half. He becomes a fighter for the Alliance. He takes out the Empire's glorious technological marvel with a single manually-targeted torpedo volley. He begins learning what the Jedi are about, and how giving himself over to the will of the universe can give him great insight and ability.

This is where Luke learns the benefits of religion, but he also learns the benefits of science. Remember, Luke's best friend and closest companion through the first two movies is a robot: R2-D2. As Ben Kenobi and Yoda are Luke's mentors in religion, so is Artoo his mentor in science. It's Artoo who first sets him on his path, not Ben; without Artoo he would never have known why Ben was important in the first place. Artoo carries the Death Star battle plans. Artoo attends Luke's X-Wing and plots the course to Dagobah. Artoo fixes the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon, finally allowing our heroes to escape. In fact, even while he studies the ways of the Force, Luke becomes so familiar and comfortable with the realm of science that he learns to speak Droid. This is Artoo's role in Star Wars: to give Luke perspective. Religion is great and all for its powers of oratory and determination, but when you need to actually get shit done, science is the guy you want on call.

This also leads Luke to his first real test of character. Yoda tells Luke to stay, but Luke, using reason, deems that his knowledge of his friends' suffering will allow him to prevent it. Conversely, when Luke first confronts Vader, a vastly superior mechanical foe, he uses intuition to fight him. The problem with both of these decisions is that Luke is still trying to navigate the world based on either-or principles. If religion is wrong, default to science; if science is wrong, default to religion. But what if they're both wrong?

Well, then you get your hand chopped off by your dad. Life's a motherfucker like that.

At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is at a crossroads. He knows that science is flawed, and that following the path of his father will lead to mechanization and lifeless duty to the state; he's even got a mechanical hand to remind him of that. He also knows that religion, in deference to what Kenobi and Yoda told him, cannot hold all the answers. That too leads to death; he has, after all, seen Ben himself die while pridefully clinging to his idealistic and irrational faith. But Luke is still alive. The Alliance is still fighting. Some of their friends are lost to them, but they have new friends now.

Here is where Luke makes his most drastic and amazing decision: he chooses to follow no path, but to forge instead into unknown territory and cut his own way. At the fork in the road that turns left to science and right to religion, Luke takes the only way that truly makes sense: forward. He is careful not to dismiss the lessons of the right and left; they have been useful tools, and he will not abandon them out of spite. With science he constructs a new lightsaber to replace the one lost to his father, and with religion he learns the proper way to wield it. Most importantly, he does all this on his own.

When Luke returns, he is a grown man. He dresses in all black, a curiously stylish embrace of his father's scientific world to set him apart from the loose-robed Jedi ascetics we have seen before him. He is calm, even-voiced, controlled. He is sure of his abilities, but not overconfident. When his techniques fail, he is not distracted by anger, nor does he give himself up to despair. It seems Luke has tread a line between both worlds: he wields both the efficiency of science and the assurance of religion.

But it's not until the fight over the Sarlaac pit that Luke's true power opens up like Krishna revealing his ultimate form to Arjuna.

Once the green lightsaber is activated, Hell on Earth breaks loose from Luke's hands. His dizzying flurry of attacks are furious and unrelenting, like nothing we have ever seen in the Star Wars universe. Until now, lightsaber battles have been something halfway between ballet and fencing, with careful opponents measuring each other like chess masters or poker players. Luke, in contrast, is a 500 pound quarterback. He does not care what path it takes to get around, over, under or through you, but you can be damn sure he is going to be on the other side of you faster than you can process.

This is important thematically and cinematically: Luke is not merely a Jedi or a Rebel Alliance hero or even his father's son. He is something completely new to the Star Wars universe, and that was the point of his story all along. Jabba's cronies fluster and flail at Luke's onslaught of pain and death. Even the supreme badass of Star Wars, Boba Fett, gets his face so thoroughly handed to him by Luke that a half-blind Han Solo ends up taking him out with an accidental assist. The reason this is so effective, so believable, and so accurate, is because it is literally true that none of them have encountered anything like this before, and neither has the audience. Luke is like a Lovecraftian horror emerging from n-space, something so alien and impossibly outside the accepted science-religion continuum as to be inconceivable to the common man.

Luke is a fully realized alchemist at this point in the story. From here on, all that is left is for Luke to fulfill his destiny as the harbinger of the new authority of self. He visits Yoda, but what more can Yoda teach him at this point? He has so far surpassed Yoda that the only thing the little green elf can possibly do to help him is get out of his way. He then goes to see Vader, and their confrontation is largely the same, although admittedly somewhat notably more intense, since Vader refuses to accept that Luke has nothing to learn from him, and won't change his mind until he's on the bad end of an embarrassingly exhaustive ass-beating.

Unfortunately, there's also the Emperor to deal with. “You meddlesome kid,” says Palpatine, “do you honestly believe that you and your pathetic self-policing are any match for the mechanized juggernaut of science and progress? You're nothing to me, kid. You're a stain on my suit collar, an unfortunate oversight at best. I wield the power of the elements and atoms; what the fuck do you have?”

And sadly, Palpatine is correct. The final lesson that Luke has to learn is his most painful: that even though you have chosen the path of alchemy, even though you are now a fully self-made man with all the authority and powers due, people are still going to try to kill you, and some of them can. Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you, and Palpatine is one motherfucker of a bear.

And then Vader finally sees the light. “Fuck you,” says Vader, “the kids are alright. And I'll fucking kill myself to stop you hurting them. What the fuck do YOU have, bitch?” Palpatine goes down in a trail of fire and madness, and Vader dies in contentment, proud of his only son, who has done what he'd always dreamed of and never truly accomplished: becoming Nietzsche's superhuman.

In our modern world, we have largely abandoned alchemy. As I've noted earlier in this post, that works to the benefit of the people who run things in the world and need everyone else unempowered enough to let them. But I would posit that we as a society have felt the hunger in the pits of our stomachs, that we have craved that long denied self-actuation, and that this is the real reason why the original Star Wars trilogy rings with such clarity to our imaginations.

It's also the prevailing reason why the prequels don't. Here we have the opposite system to the Empire: a Republic run largely on dogma and faith, with Jedi Knights entrusted with the highest ceremonial, political and military duties – duties for which they are about as appropriate and qualified as Bono is to hold an audience with the Pope (another perplexedly accurate real world parallel). We hate the prequels because they're the exact opposite of the originals. Instead of a third option, they present us with only two equally vile ones: an austere life of service to the Force bereft of love or passion, or a public life of service to the state bereft of awesomeness. Ironically, Jar Jar Binks, well established as the most hated of the prequel characters, is in fact the only one that escapes this binary pull; he may be a clueless, loud, accident-prone jackass, but at least he's not mind-numbingly boring. Jar Jar's only sin is that he is a man out of time. He has no place in the prequels because the prequels are not where alchemists belong. If he'd been a supporting character in the Rebel Alliance, I speculate we'd hold him in a similar regard as we do Admiral Ackbar or Lobot, or at the very least the Ewoks*.

More to the point, the world has only gotten more mechanized and faith-based since the release of the original Star Wars trilogy. It would have been nice for the prequels to speak to that, to give us hope once again that, somewhere, there were yet some alchemists forging rules for themselves and accepting the destiny of supermen. The nature of the science-religion dichotomy is the illusory choice between fate and effort. There is no choice, says alchemy. Fate and effort are one in the same, and once you realize that and accept it, your true power will be revealed.

Alas, George Lucas himself is, as stated elsewhere in this blog, now a slave to science. Lucas has become Anakin; we can no more expect him to deliver us an alchemical narrative as we can expect Darth Vader to take up the mantle of self-made man. But perhaps his offspring have a few tricks up their black-clad sleeves.

* Say what you will about the Ewoks, but I firmly contend that the Battle of Endor is a striking parable of the Vietnam War: the Empire is well-equipped, entrenched, and disproportionally technologically superior, and they get their asses handed to them by stone-age spear-chuckers because they are not at all prepared for the type of guerrilla warfare that the Ewoks are willing to wage.

Phantom Menace, Indeed.

2011-05-31T18:31:00.001-07:00

Something JUST hit me about the Star Wars prequels: ostensibly, the entire plot of them are about Anakin being frustrated with not having enough power to fix all the stuff in his life that stinks. If he could just control enough – say, for example, whether or not people live or die – everything would finally work out and everyone will be happy and everyone will love him. Instead, doing this turns him into the most hated and evil man in the universe, because the actual problem is not that Anakin can't fix problems, but that Anakin is a flawed, small man who has never learned how to exist within the limitations of the life he has.

Now here's the brain-twistingly insane, yet embarrassingly obvious when you actually say it aloud, thing I just realized: THIS IS, VERBATIM, WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO GEORGE LUCAS WHILE MAKING THESE SAME PREQUELS.

It is well-documented that Lucas has always been very vocal about his frustrations with both the original trilogy and how Hollywood functions. He's yearned for the day he could exhibit his personal vision directly, translating whatever it is he sees in his mind directly to film. Here's the problem: what's in his mind is a schizophrenic mess. He is a good filmmaker in the literal sense: he knows how to get a shot, how to light it and frame it and block it. But it's also well-documented that actors absolutely loathe his directorial style and producers cringe at his scripts. He is a cinematographer, not a storyteller. And he just can't accept that.

So: a strapping young lad with a head full of dreams helps to build an empire by exploiting the self-same system that annoys him so much. When he amasses enough raw power, finally able to exhibit total control over every aspect of his world, he does so; and in that process, he completely ruins what was beautiful about his universe and makes everyone despise him.

Just like Darth Vader. George Lucas IS Anakin Skywalker! And like Vader, Lucas is now a broken man; as a younger, more adventurous lad he did many great things (Powaqqatsi, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Labyrinth, Grim Fandango, Maniac Mansion – just off the top of my head). Now? He's a breathless clown encased in machines; a slave to technology, even more frustrated than ever, embittered by his inability to escape karma, lashing out at anyone who criticizes him with ruthless viciousness. Imagine being George Lucas. You can't go ANYWHERE; you get hungry for a Subway run, you can't just show up and order a meatball sub. It takes 19 underlings, a delivery car, a pseudonym, a secure system of communication between all elements in play; that sandwich costs $5000 now and by the time you get it you're not even hungry anymore, it's cold and soggy, someone probably spat in it when they figured out it was for you for “ruining their childhood”, and you hate everything.

The weirdest thing about all this is that neither the character nor his creator seem like they could do anything to stop it in the fake OR real worlds. Art doesn't just imitate life here; they are literally exact copies of one another, with parallels so vast and intricate that it boggles the mind how anyone could be inside it and not see it glaring them in the face.

Going Back To Tapes

2011-05-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

It's finally happened: the realization that I no longer understand young people, and am therefore by definition not included in their number. I can't say exactly when this inevitable metamorphosis began. I tried to fight it. I was hip for many years of my 30s. I listened to Boards of Canada and Chromeo and Jedi Mind Tricks while simultaneously posing ironically down with the latest Beyonce single. I blogged without reserve or censorship, unafraid to be labeled a troll or an exhibitionist (or, at times, an outright racist). I straddled that fine line with young, skinny, crazy white girls, between "respecting" them as "people" while still angling to smash them in their ratchet asses. I used blatantly co-opted street terms like "smash" and "ratchet". I was a boss.

Then one day, I found myself flipping through Hip Hop Weekly, staring at pictures of Waka Flocka blazed out of his gourd and Gucci Mane with a tattoo on his face that, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was an ice cream cone with a lightning bolt coming out of it, still looked like an ejaculating penis, and that terrifying confession forced itself into my consciousness: I had no idea who any of these people were. Like an Alzheimer's sufferer in a nursing home, I suddenly found myself surrounded by unfamiliar faces. Who are you people? Where's my house? Are you my daughter?

I didn't want to know who they were, either. Fuck your hip hop! I grew up in the 80s, you little bitches! I was in this game when Doug E Fresh and the Fat Boys were on the radio! I got up early to be there when the record store opened the day Public Enemy's He Got Game soundtrack came out! I own vinyl! I... wait. This is what old people say, the 21st century equivalent of boasting about walking barefoot to school every day uphill in the snow. There was no turning back now, I had played my hand. I was, by my own admission, out of the loop.

I saw two options before me. I could, pathetically, try to reclaim some semblance of hipness. Download the latest Kimmy Blanco diss album, see if I can work some Taylor Swift tracks into a mashup... people still make mashups, right? I'll look that up later on my wifi-enabled Palm Tungsten when the kids at the coffeeshop can see me... huh? What's a 4G network? What do you mean everybody drinks Neuro instead of coffee now? Jesus, this is going to take some homework. I'll need some new brand names... Wet Seal? Do they make clothes for men? God damn it, I'm so fucked.

The other path, obviously, was to resolve myself to fate and bask in the glory of being blissfully free of the demands of pop culture. Delete your Facebook and Twitter accounts! Pull out the oversized plaid shirts and Doc Martens! Load up the De La Soul and Pearl Jam! My life will no longer be Y2K compatible: anything conceived after 1999 will be promptly given the Gas Face. Oh, how it feels so good to say "Gas Face", so natural and familiar. Truly this was the correct option.

I dug out my old box of cassettes and my Scott DD700B dual deck. Cassette recording was a huge part of my life for over a decade; I was a veritable master of the mixtape, back when that term meant you could expect both a mix and a tape. Nowadays, the word has been co-opted by the modern hip hop school to mean "a haphazard pastiche of my own lame-ass bullshit that I'm too embarrassed to call an album". Ha! That felt great! You damn kids, get off my lawn!

The artistry of the mixtape comes not from being able to put anything you want on it. That's easy; everyone thinks they have taste. The true beauty of the cassette come from its limitations, which have been lost in the era of infinite online cloud space and instant Music Beta accessibility. The physical limitation of a normal bias C60 is 30 minutes of content per side and no frequencies higher than 16 kHz. Even a cursory music listener would cringe at those restrictions today: what! My iPod holds 12000 songs, and I use Beats headphones!

Yes, it's true that you have 12000 songs that you kind of like on tap, but you fast forward through virtually all of them trying to find the one that strikes your mood, which is itself ever vacillating due to the schizophrenic nature of modern civilization... which that iPod and devices like it help to create. We old folks call this a "vicious circle". The vast freedom of choice becomes an enabler, creating an additive feedback loop from which there can be no escape without intentional limitations. If your tools are always changing and expanding, then by definition you can never become their master.

Which may be why so many young people today seem so lost, undirected, unsure, and scared. As John Taylor Gatto has noted:

Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the 21st century cannot concentrate on anything for very long, they have a poor sense of time past and to come, they are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.

It's hardly surprising that they've ended up so. Pathos is absent in the modern world. What do children of the modern age have to look forward to? Only twenty years ago, there were yet massive obstacles to overcome. The internet as we know it had yet to exist. The notion of a black president was still relegated to the realm of science fiction. Certainly we have not eradicated all problems of society, but that's not the point. To a child, the world seems infinite and unrestricted, and so they grow up believing so; with no perceptions of barriers, they develop with no drive to break them. They're like a species that evolved on an island without natural predators. Rebellion becomes passe when nothing remains to rebel against.

Even an artificial deadline creates tension; anyone who's played the original Super Mario Brothers can tell you that. As I roll gracefully into middle age, I find that what I've been most missing is that driving force, that wall to climb over to see what's on the other side; it might be as boring and disappointing as what's on this side, but so what? The act itself is an accomplishment. Ultimately, the walls of the world exist not to restrict us, but rather to keep us from overthinking. If I decide to write, I have chosen a restriction. If I decide to write a steampunk novel in an alternate Civil War history, I have chosen a large restriction. I don't need to worry about those variables anymore, which frees me to concentrate on the more important details. As religion often fills the vacant space left by nihilism, so too do limitations fill the uncertainty of directionlessness.

Don't be afraid of getting old and set in your ways. As David Mamet wrote: "The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious." That applies to living as much as film; you've figured out the generalities, now move on to the particulars.

Fucking the mannequin

2011-03-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

I watch you, standing motionless and quiet, your glass eyes gazing over me at the wall behind. Carefully, I step onto the pedestal with you, not wanting to imbalance it and send you falling, and once my equilibrium is certain, I embrace your plastic body, kissing your solid, unmoving lips.

You are an object of purest lust to me, the hollow shell of a woman without any center. Unfeeling, unyielding, uncaring, undenying. You are cold and calloused, unable to look me in the eye, your molded expression permanently dismissive of my sincerity; and yet, you are the ultimate woman: you do not judge me for my depravity, you do not push me away, you are infinitely accepting.

My manhood stiffens, causing all sophistry and validation to fall wayside. You are the Galatea for my Pygmalion, and I will offer a sacrifice of my seed to the goddess Aphrodite. Having no true womanhood, I am called to improvise upon you, rubbing myself along the contours of your fiberglass form as a dog humps a leg. I grind myself against your hard, smooth, painted skin, gazing into your unmoving, unblinking eyes as I rise to orgasm.

There can be nothing within you; only a pretty statue stands allowing my perversity, but in the moment of passion, in that happy eclipse of the sun where all that is sacred or reasonable goes dark to the shadow of the animal, I look in your eyes, and I see love.

And I love you, too.

A Brief Autobiography

2010-08-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

I break it down to decades: my first ten years I am a child, and spend them in Prospect Park, Pennsylvania, a deeply urban bedroom community ten minutes from Philadelphia. I am born; I grow a lonely, fatherless boy, raised by a disaffected mother, foreboding grandmother and a vacuum-tube television set; I learn very quickly which one of the three to trust most. School comes, and I make friends -- Steven Weatherill being my best one, after a blackout during a rainstorm forces us together -- but I am quite obviously different. I am programming computers by age 7. I am bullied frequently, cast as a freak. Even my teachers hate me; Mr. Lewis physically abuses me in 4th grade, and Mrs. Neff emotionally abuses me in 5th grade.

In 1985 we sell our house and move to neighboring Glenolden. I have almost no friends; only my art teacher takes pity on me, and I spend many after-school hours in her classroom. I test at college level on that year’s aptitude tests; meanwhile, the school’s gifted program literally runs out of things to teach me. The decision is made to send me to Milton Hershey School, where I spend six more years in a place which also has nothing to teach me, and I am beaten by drunken dorm fathers and sexually molested by upperclassmen. During my time there, my family moves to rural Nottingham, Pennsylvania. Upon graduation, I am left to nurse after my ailing, increasingly delusional grandmother for three years, with no prospects for college or other continuing education. That's decade number two.

My third decade begins with my discovery of electronic music, specifically the artist Aphex Twin, and I decide to pursue music. Simultaneously, I make new friends at nearby radio station WVUD in Newark, Delaware, and within a year I've moved to that town. I work at the now-defunct East End Cafe, becoming a raging alcoholic mess squatting in a room on 18 Ritter Lane. I take LSD for the first time. I release albums under a female sockpuppet and make thousands of dollars. I move to North Carolina, and back, and New Jersey, and back. I form a band, and we record the two best electronic albums of all time. I fall in love so hard I take a train to California to lose my virginity, and I fall out of love so hard it takes me two years to recover. Everyone betrays me, or maybe I betray everyone -- details are fuzzy. I leave Delaware in disgust. I move to Arizona.

This is decade number four. I'm six years in, and it's drastically different from the previous three. I've signed into a domestic partnership. I've cut off most of my friends and family from the East Coast. I've become financially stable (more or less) and emotionally stable (more or less) -- or is that, too, just a failure of perspective? Will I look back on this decade as a horrible mess, as I have the three before it? In truth, all the decades before certainly seemed to be the important ones while they were happening. Is that the lesson of this life: to remember that now is the only important-seeming moment, a moment that is fleeting and detestable in retrospect?

Can you feel it?

2010-06-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

June 25, 2009, 2:15 AM MST

Dr. Rhythm blinked repeatedly. "Chisa, what the Hell am I looking at?"

"Don't you start," I said, adjusting the volume on the store stereo, which I had jerry-rigged into my laptop along with the advertising monitor from the lottery machine. "This is one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made, and anyone who speaks ill of it will require a crowbar to extract my foot from their asshole." The screen, facing outwards towards the customers, was awash with colorful rainbow sparkles over footage of an adoring throng.

Kupo walked in, fresh from the plane trip, and grinned like a maniac as soon as he saw the screen. "Holy shit," he said, "where did you get a copy of this?"

"Had the missus torrent it for me," I replied. "Welcome to Tucson."

A regular customer, one of the hip kids that works at the local video store, came in behind Kupo, pausing and gawking as his eyes fell on the images. "I haven't seen this in ages!"

"Blame this guy," I said, pointing at Kupo. "He came all the way down from Baltimore to drive back with Dr. Rhythm. I figured the least I could do was make him feel at home."

"I do love me some Michael Jackson," said Kupo, still grinning.

We watched Moonwalker. It is, to put it mildly, an unusual work. The first third of the film is a retrospective of Jackson's early years, leading up through Thriller and Bad. At the second third, it becomes a compilation, with a new video remix of "Bad", the Claymation rendered "Speed Demon" and the collage art cum social critique of "Leave Me Alone." But it's the final third of the film that most people remember: a ridiculous, cinematographic epic wherein a mythological MJ archetype fights a Joe Pesci led laser-armed drug cartel by transforming into a panther, a car, a huge robot and finally a spaceship. And then he performs a cover of the Beatles' "Come Together" in a raunchy nightclub and Ladysmith Black Mambazo sings over the credits.

A large number of people cite this movie as the exact point that Michael Jackson lost his damned mind.

---

A recent article from BBC News cites scientific proof that there is a correlation between genius and schizophrenia. I hold all scientific studies in contempt as a general rule. Often the declarations should simply read: Study confirms that funder of study was correct; could be more correct with more money, say scientists. As I've noted at length elsewhere on this blog: if you want to change reality, paying for it is the easiest method.

Not all geniuses are insane, and not all insane people are geniuses -- unless you're willing to make the counterarguments that John Wayne Gacy was some sort of artistic visionary or that Stephen Hawking ought to be confined to a rubber room for his crazy-ass ideas about aliens and time travel. (Full disclosure: I actually do believe the latter one.) Nature doles out benefits as she may. Sometimes you get to be a genius; sometimes you die in childbirth. It's not fair, but we insist that it be, somehow, to salve our psychological inability to deal with existentialism. I'm pretty sure this is the evolutionary reason we have religion, too, but that's a subject for another time.

---

What is a subject for now, however, is the belief that Michael Jackson was a child molester. First of all -- let's not mince any words here -- no one, absolutely no one has made that charge stick. If we are a nation that believes in and even prides itself on the fairness of our justice system, then we shall not have the luxury of perjurious scandal in the wake of its verdicts. If anything, the lingering doubt we hold in regards to Jackson shows how vile and sordid we prefer our bias to be, damn the facts to the contrary.

We crave sensationalism and the breaking of scruples for the same reason we need mad geniuses: we, the public, are quite simply unable to take anything at face value. Consider the hoax that surrounded Fred Rogers during his life. Nefarious rumors spread that he always wore long-sleeved sweaters to hide the tattoos he got as a Navy SEAL sniper in Vietnam. Nevermind that Rogers, a nigh saintly man by all accounts, never served in the military in any capacity. We need Fred Rogers to be a bloodthirsty killing machine, because if there's one thing we can't stand, it's someone who doesn't have any vices.

That's why we need Michael to be a child fucker, too, but it goes deeper than that for Michael. He gets away with all the things we wish we could. He's weird, and cool, and effortless all at once. His innocence appeals to the child in us and his sexuality seduces the animal in us; to wit, he owns a zoo for the latter and an amusement park for the former. He's rich -- obscenely, distastefully rich on a level that nobody else in the world gets without brutally assfucking someone or another on the way up. He breaks the rules, then rewrites them, then breaks them again. He is a god among mortals. That's why we hate him so; that's why he must be destroyed.

We're a culture of victimization. We relish our horrible fuckups like badges of honor in an arena of pain and misery, and what we despise more than anything is to be reminded that we have the capacity to be better. If Michael Jackson isn't a monster, our whole matrix of defense mechanisms gets thrown into disarray -- because we'd be monsters in his position.

You want proof? How about the entire hierarchy of the Catholic church, who cover time and again for real child molesters? How about all those news stories of tragic fools who finally win the lottery after a lifetime of playing, only to blow the whole wad on hookers and cocaine within eighteen months? People say that power corrupts, but that's just another popular delusion to allow us to shuck our responsibilities. The maxim actually only works in reverse; we are born corrupt, and it's only our lack of power that keeps us from doing far more damage than we do already.

---

June 25, 2009, 3:30 PM MST

I called Dr. Rhythm. "How is Kupo taking this?"

"Considering, fairly well," he answered. "He's mostly in shock. He's been crying some."

"Get him back here immediately," I ordered. "He needs to be near someone who understands."

Kupo looked drained as he stumbled in, like he'd been without sleep for days. Bleary-eyed, he gazed at me with a quiet confusion. "How did you know? How did you know to have me out to Arizona on today of all days, to show me the Moonwalker video last night... how?"

"I don't know, Steve," I admitted. "Things like this happen to me occasionally. Four years ago I had a dream I killed Hunter Thompson, and he died three days later. Last year at this time I dreamed I had an argument with George Carlin that was so vicious I made him cry, and he died two days later. Synchronicity uses me as a focal point; I don't know why."

The answer seemed to satisfy him; he nodded simply, and sat down in the easy chair to watch the coverage on CNN. Dr. Rhythm, unsure of how to proceed, looked on apologetically.

---

Two things are interesting about Jacksons' death date. First, it happened on the date of the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain. I can only imagine Prince waking up to that on Thursday morning.

More interesting is the second coincidence: June 25th would be on the opposite side of the calendar from Christmas. Is it possible Jackson was the realization of the Second Coming? He exhibited many of the same characteristics as Christ. His flagrant defiance of gravity certainly made it appear that he could walk on water. Jackson implored us to look at the Man in the Mirror; Christ told us to take the logs out of our own eyes before criticizing the specks in others'. Obvious jokes aside, Michael did suffer the little children to come unto him. And both were men of peace whom you would never want to get into a brawl with, particularly if you happened to be a banker.

Some of Jesus's last words were "I will return as a thief in the night." You have to admit, when asked to envision what a robber looks like, most Americans would probably think of a black man.

---

I owe at least two things to Michael Jackson. First, he made it okay for me to want to collect mannequins. "I imagine talking to them," he revealed to a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1982, describing the planned room in his new house that would be filled with showroom dummies. "I think I'm accompanying myself with friends I never had." The eccentric often compensates for a longing in the real world, a missing element that, for whatever reason, they are unable to adapt to socially. Even with millions of dollars and the respect and admiration of everyone from Andy Warhol to Ronald Reagan, Michael had to invent his best friends.

I could certainly relate as a child. I was no social butterfly; I preferred Encyclopedia Brown books and typing long, arduous lists of esoteric text into a new machine known as an "Apple IIe". I took apart tape recorders and tried to figure out how they worked, and recorded sounds backwards. I was fascinated by the birthing artform of rap music, and one of my most vivid childhood memories is my first attempt to "scratch" using my mother's copy of Thriller on my measly Fisher Price turntable.

That brings me to the second thing I owe Michael: he made it okay to want to be an artist. President Obama would have our children believe that thankless hard work and sucking up to the boss are the preferred methods of spending your time on Planet Earth. Michael, like Fred Rogers before him, told me that I was okay just the way I was. If I wanted to spend my days pecking out computer programs that made weird, bleepy noises, that wasn't merely not wrong; I was compelled to do so. Who I am and what I do are not separate entities.

If we take nothing else from Michael Jackson's life, let us for God's sake take that: it is your world. If it's miserable, you have no one to blame but you.

---

Today marks the one year anniversary of Jackson's death. I've been poking at this post since then, trying to get the words right, trying to explain how a man I never met could have such a profound impact on my small and measured life. The words do not come easy. As with many things esoteric, reason is only the beginning of wisdom; that which goes beyond is not explainable, not definable, not recordable.

But do I even need to? You were there in 1982; you wanted one of those damn ridiculous red zipper jackets so bad, because we all did. We wanted a piece of Michael because Michael was a piece of us; the unapologetic, empowered part we'd learned to push down so we could get through the day at school without being sent to the principal's office.

Don't push it down, said Michael. Let go of it. Let it run wild and free and touch the world with its beauty and joy. Let it shine like a beacon to the shore, showing the way to others who've become lost in the vast gray seas of mediocrity and hopelessness. Let them come to you and share in the joy; you are not alone; you are not alone.

If you look around
The whole world is coming together now
Feel it in the air
The wind is taking it everywhere
Can you feel it
Can you feel it
Can you feel it

Yes, God, yes, I can feel it. I can see inside the light that burns with the heat of a thousand suns. I see the grace and the beauty stirring, emanating from the deepest cockle of my breast, from the vantage point of my homunculus, and I will live in the light, I will know the light, and it will shine in glory for all the worlds.

I can feel it. I can hear the sound rumbling under the materia, the deepest bass of earthquakes and microwave bursts from quasars. I can hear the sound of the stars and the galaxies vibrating and spinning in their places like a giant watch, like the transmission of a humongous engine, and the sound comes bursting out of me.

I can feel it. I can feel the intense and all-pervading sincerity of compassion, of nonjudgmental caring, and it swarms over me like a sandstorm, like a hurricane of locusts. I can feel the warm winds of the scirocco eroding away the sarcasm and malice, time's steadfast chisel whittling away the impurities. I can feel the heat of the athenor, the alchemical furnace of searing light, burning away the hatred and the rage, reducing this bloated, sluggish body in fire and empathy like succulent broth from the blood of ruminants, until only the most beautiful, the most elegant parts remain, so forged in the blazes of love's relentless fire to serve forever, to offer myself for any and all uses, without precondition or complaint, to be one with the will of all, of every person, until I am nothing but an extension of every man and woman and child, until I have become all of their dreams, until I dissolve into the void of the universe, the fifth ring of Miyamoto Musashi, to see the Void as the Way, to see the Way as the Void.

I can feel it.

I can feel it.

I can feel it.

The Hurricane

2010-05-22T04:09:00.000-07:00

There is no companionship with a fool; let a man walk alone, let him commit no sin, having few wishes, like an elephant in the forest.
-- the Dhammapada

I reached Tucson, Arizona on November 21st, 2004. A few days before my arrival, it began to rain. It rained for two whole months following; for the first time in decades, the water table broke even in the desert.

This would not be the first time I was introduced by precipitation. Almost a decade prior, I'd moved to Newark, Delaware on December 23rd, 1995. Three days later, the infamous Blizzard of '96 hit the town. A thousand stories have been told about this snowstorm; I could compile just the ones I've heard into a very successful book which would make Northern Exposure look like a sensible vacation slide show.

In the Book of the Subgenius, it says many times: the only way to get what you truly want is to give up entirely. I gave up on Newark. I took a train to Tucson, to live with some friends for a while. My new roommates were past generous; they were damn near saintly. In return, I shared what I had: Millennium Actress, Chrono Trigger, Threads. One weekend I told them of the genius of Crispin Glover, whose career they knew nothing of outside of Back to the Future. "You mean he sued Steven Spielberg and WON? That's AWESOME!"

"Yes, he's quite the self-made man. I'm eager to see his full-length film, What Is It, but it's extremely difficult to come by."

I began to acclimate to the desert. I spent time looking up venues in Arizona, ready to get on with performing music. In my various web searches I discovered Centennial Hall, an immense campus auditorium, and thought absently how great it would be to play such a large space, to cause an actual concert hall to resonate with my music.

Something was still missing.

I tried hanging out at local cafes; both Ike's and Safehouse were within walking distance. I ended up becoming more enamored with the free wifi than the local patrons, overhearing the same 'original ideas' again and again with each passing. This was no different from Newark; a glory-hole of self-deluded children, fashionably dressed, with a database of cultural inferences and not-too-weird tastes, lest the facade of faux nerdism pass into the genuine article.

With no small degree of despair, I realized I was getting too old for this shit.

---

Kupo's girlfriend popped on. "Do you have any interest in meeting people in Tucson?"

"Do I ever. What's up?"

"There's a friend on MOO who lives quite near you, by name of Kali. She's quite an interesting person, someone I think you'd get along with well. Would you like me to introduce you?"

"It certainly couldn't hurt. How do I get on this MOO? Is it like a MUD?"

"Same general principle. I'll help you through the registration process, but you can log on as a guest for now." She gave me the server address.

I set up a coffee date with Kali, at Ike's; she claimed she hated Safehouse, citing too much smoke and youth culture nonsense, which I could hardly argue. We talked for hours about music and art; it was evident that we would become fast friends. "I should introduce you to my friend Paul Miller sometime," she said at one point. "I think you'd both benefit from the mutual brain-picking."

I blinked twice. "The Paul Miller? As in, DJ Spooky?"

"The same. We've been friends for years; I met him through an afrofuturism forum. In fact, it's interesting that you both use afrofuturism in your art in distinct ways. With Team Techno, you and your bandmates have constructed a very African way of working -- call and response, chorus, syncopation and polyrhythms all play integral parts in the way you construct and perform music -- but of course you all have very European traditions, being of Caucasian heritage. With Spooky, the opposite is true: he forwards an African agenda using very European techniques." She paused, perhaps to let the ideas sink into me, or to herself. "Actually, I'd be interested in writing an academic piece about your band sometime."

I shrugged. "That's a flattering notion, but I'm not sure there's a band to write about anymore."

---

"What the fuck is this 'third Team Techno album' bullshit Bill is spouting?"

"Come on, Chisa. You know Bill: the eternal optimist. 'Where there's a will, there's a way...'"

"Where was that maxim when I was spending two years in Delaware, living with clinically insane roommates, in the middle of severe depression without medication, in a dead-end job, slugging through the worst post-breakup drama of my life? Would you care to show me where the fucking 'way' was that my Schopenhauer-like dedication of will was not able to produce? The notion of me ever coming back there to record an album with you two is so goddamn laughable, I ought to patent TCP-to-bitchslap technology in case you ever suggest something that idiotic again; it'd save me the hassle of all this typing, and let me cut to the chase of knocking some goddamn sense into your ass."

"Whatever, man. If you feel such a need to solder that door shut, that's your deal. I prefer to leave options open."

"Is that why, when I asked if you'd let me move into one of the five bedrooms in your house in Philly, three of which were unoccupied and rented for the specific purpose of having friends live with you, because I wanted to be near you and Bill and retain my sanity, you told me no, because your girlfriend wouldn't approve? Is that what you call 'leaving options open'?"

"Look, I'm sorry I can't perpetually bail you out, but sometimes I just can't accommodate your lifestyle choice. Here's a thought: how's about nigga gets a fucking job and his own place?"

"You've got a lot of damn nerve, son. Who held your sorry ass up when that same girlfriend dropped you on a whim? Bill, that's who -- you slept in his annex for a month! In contrast, I went through Hell with the Ex, and the nonsense with Baker being AWOL in New Orleans, and the heroin junkies and all the other fuckups in the Madison house, and I held a third shift job and did Team Techno. How about 'nigga' stops being a fucking hypocrite?"

"You did indeed have a tough time in Delaware that last year, and I did indeed move into that house with the intention of having friends live there, but it just didn't work out, for many different reasons. And now, I'm practically married..."

"Bill was literally married when you moved in with him! What kind of two-faced bullshit is this?"

"Call me what you will; I'm not responsible for anyone else's living situation but my own."

"That's a peculiar moralistic view from someone who's about to give birth to a child."

"You are not my son."

"No, but I did think I was your brother."

"I'm not your fucking keeper. Take care of your own shit, man!"

I paused, gazing at the words on the screen, mulling them over. "So that's how it is now? Are you sure you want to go down that road with me?"

"I can't deal with this shit right now. You are annoying the piss out of me." He logged off.

---

Time passed. Now-distant friends were tried and found wanting. Some left, never to return. Some just needed time to cool off.

I moved into Kali's studio for a bit, sensing my previous roommates needed their space back, in deference to their claims that I was not a burden. Kali essentially became my agent, helping me to set up shows and network with local contacts. Within a few months, I was standing on the stage at Centennial Hall. A few weeks after that, I was speaking directly to Crispin Glover, having just viewed What Is It in the Loft Cinema.

There was a noticeable turbulence to the air. I could sense the oncoming storm at the horizon.

---

"Hey," I said, peering over the 32-channel Behringer, "this is identical to the board I used to run for EIDE, at the East End back in Delaware."

"Really?" replied Gene. "You know, we don't exactly have a dedicated soundman. Would you be interested?"

I thought about it. "Hmm, maybe. I've got plenty of spare time on my hands; a hobby might be just what I need. And the notion of being the straight soundman in a nearly-all-queer choir tickles my irony bone."

Gene snickered. "Believe you me, I can relate. Well, I'll put a bug in the director's ear, see if we can't get you two chatting..."

A young black man approached cautiously, seeming a little shy. "And who might this be, Gene?"

"Oh! Jamal, this is Chisa, a friend who came out to watch us perform."

"Pleased to meet you," I said, shaking Jamal's hand.

"Did I hear you say something about Delaware? I wasn't trying to pry, but... I'm originally from Southeast Pennsylvania."

"Really! That's where I'm originally from as well. Whereabouts?"

"Oh, I grew up in I'd really like to fuck you, just South of Allentown."

I shook myself. Huh? "Er... Allentown, you say? I know that area. I was considering going to Lincoln Tech for electronics when I got out of high school."

"Well, isn't it a small world?" He smiled. "So what brings I hope you're gay like me to Arizona?"

Kali came up from behind me. "I'm sorry if I'm interrupting, but were we going to get lunch together, Chisa? We'd better go now or we'll miss the start of the concert."

"Ah, yes," I said. "It was nice meeting you, Jamal." I nodded politely to he and Gene, then walked off with Kali.

---

"I think that guy was hitting on me," I concluded, finally.

"What do you mean, 'you think?' He most certain was." Kali sipped at her chai.

"Well, I've never really received a signal like that before."

"Ever?" She looked astonished.

"I'm sure that sounds weird, but yes, I can honestly say I've never been able to tell the difference between my own wishful thinking and someone actually making a pass at me. Rather than risk the misinterpretation, I gave up trying and just assumed no one ever was, but just then, it was damn near like telepathy."

Kali shook her head. "Fathomless," she said, reaching for the ketchup, a brassy glint of sunlight catching her ring.

"Hey," I said, leaning closer, "that's neat. Where'd you get that?"

Kali blinked, then smiled. "Ah, now it makes sense. You've never seen this before, have you?"

"It's the first time I've ever seen it."

"Well, it's been on my finger since I've met you. I've been wearing this ring for years; I never take it off." She extended her finger; the Medusa-head emblem radiated ancient power. It looked like a molding from the Roman Empire, and may very well have been. "It's old -- older than I care to think about. It reveals itself to people when it wants to. Today was apparently a very special day."

I sighed. "You know, your mystical artifacts are really beginning to piss me off. Bad enough that you left that voodoo blood ritual nonsense going in your studio when you went out hiking the Grand Canyon. I was shaken for weeks after that dream where I killed Hunter Thompson."

"It was only a dream."

"He died three days later."

She laughed. "New topic, then: when are you going to start deejaying on the MOO?"

"I can't very well stream audio with a dead laptop." My beloved Toshiba had shit the bed a few weeks prior, the power connector on its motherboard blown out from capacitor plague.

"You could always use my iBook."

"You know I despise Macs. As soon as Kupo ships my desktop from Baltimore, I'll get on. Who'd you say I'd have to talk to?"

"Her name is Muggy."

---

I was familiar with text-based environments like the MOO, having spent quite a lot of time on MUSHes and MUCKs in the mid-90s. It didn't take me long to learn both the basics of its system syntax and the peculiarities of its social lattice.

Muggy ran a room on the MOO, which was fairly popular for that server. I logged on and teleported my character there. "Kali says you're the one I need to talk to about doing the radio stream?"

"Wheee!" said Muggy. "Yeah, it's this new thing I've just set up recently. You know how to do Icecast?"

"Most of my streaming experience is with Shoutcast, but as I understand it's the same basic principal, and uses the same tools."

"Let me set you up with a login," she said. As she worked on allowing me access in another window, I typed a look command on her character, curious as to how she'd described herself:

Spawn of William S Burroughs, naked, sucking translucent, colored syrups through Welcome, Chisa of Team Techno. purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of I have been waiting for one such as you for a very long time now. secretes an addicting fluid from her Listen carefully: here are the songs you must play for me...

The words on the screen may as well have been invisible; the true message was hidden inside them, like a television signal in a carrier wave. I shook myself, dazed by their power. It was a far more potent signal than I'd gotten from Jamal, a directive akin to those heard by Elijah and Abraham.

"Okay," she said, "You're ready to go, check your MOOmail for the password."

"Solid," I said. "When would you like me to go?"

"No time like the present," she said.

"Right now? I thought you were on."

"Oh, that's just an automated playlist. I can kick it off whenever. Saddle up!"

I nodded, logging my Winamp plugin into the server and routing the audio from Virtual Turntables to the input. After a brief perusal of my mp3s, I opened with something from a DJ Spooky album:

I've got two turntables and Coltrane
And not just blue Coltrane
And not just Monk, and not just Miles
I got a million musicians playin' over my head
A band of angels responding to the percussion of stomps and hollers
Heads don't even know what's happening to 'em
They just know something's happening to 'em

Song blended into song without audible break, each addition to the setlist crafting a new chapter in the story. Boards of Canada morphed into Steve Miller; Future Sound of London gave way to Palace Brothers; Tears For Fears engaged Telefon Tel Aviv. Faraway, in Chattanooga, the atmospheric disturbance charged the air with its haunting sound.

"I ain't never seen nothin' like you before," said Muggy, her Southern drawl coming clearly through the text, punctuated by an equally clear eyebrow raise.

---

"I found a place to live."

"Splendid!" Kali smiled. "Where?"

"Tennessee."

The smile gave way to incredulous shock. "Okay," she said after a moment of self-composure, "because I'm your friend, I have to tell you I think this is a bad idea. You're moving way too fast with Muggy, and this is an incredibly rash decision."

I nodded. "Opinion noted and filed. You are pre-approved for one 'I told you so' should anything go horribly wrong."

"When do you leave?"

"Independence Day. Assuming everything goes without a hitch -- which it won't, seeing as I'll have to go through New Orleans, and something always goes awry whenever I have to deal with New Orleans -- she'll be picking me up in Atlanta on my birthday, since there's no Amtrak line to Chattanooga.

"Interesting. There is in fact no such thing as a Chattanooga choo-choo." There was a knock at the door. Kali got up to answer it; the UPS man was on the other side. "It's for you," she said, perusing the label on the package.

"Ah, that must be the laptop. An online friend had an extra lying around, and generously donated it so I could check in with wifi at the terminals on the trip." I took an exacto to the seals, digging through the styrofoam peanuts until the contents were revealed. A grimace overtook my face.

"What's the matter?" asked Kali.

I reached into the box and pulled out a Mac. Kali burst into laughter.

---

"I'm very sorry, sir, but all routes have been annulled for today due to Tropical Storm Cindy. You see, the dam is currently open, to keep the river from back-flowing into the city, and the wash goes straight over the tracks."

"So I'm stuck here for a day, then?"

"It appears that way. The next available train is tomorrow, same time as the one you would have been on today."

I was exhausted from two days of sleeplessness. On the Silver Meteor, I was plagued by a little shit whose mother obviously never give him enough attention. He could only talk in a loud bark, and made it his personal mission to wake me up wherever I decided to catch a nap; the demon even found me when I hid behind stacks of suitcases in the baggage car. The Ambien and Ultracet I'd acquired only compounded matters; I was like a zombie on the sleep aids and painkillers, a drained corpse deprived of its final rest. It took all my remaining strength not to take my frustration out on the poor ticketer. "Fine, then. Swap me out, I'll take tomorrow's train."

"Very good, sir." He took my old ticket and presented me with a near-identical one, the only difference being the departure date: July 7.

I trudged back to the Meteor; it was docked there for a day, unable to return to its home, and the conductors had left it open for the stranded travelers to use. I retired to the cafe car; no one was there, and only a few remaining stragglers slumbered in the observation deck above. I set up an impromptu apartment in the unused space, washing myself in the lavatory. I tried to write for a bit on the iBook, but could not; I tried to sleep, but could not. Outside the station, Cindy raged against New Orleans, mocking me, keeping me from my destination on my own damn birthday.

I donned my Gore-Tex jacket, which had been nearly useless in Arizona, and packed up my belongings. Inside Union Station, I chose a terminal locker and secured my bags. Then I went outside, to the emptied night city, to confront Cindy.

She whined like a thousand-foot organ grinder through the darkened skyscrapers of Poydras and Loyola. Blankets of rain came at me like fishing nets, the likes of which I hadn't seen since my summer on Long Beach Island. I persisted through, nigh-crazed on sleeplessness and adrenaline.

Above me, a gust so fierce that it appeared solid broke away a tree branch the size of a car bumper. It soared through the air, sailing two feet above my head.

"I am the True Hurricane!" I declared defiantly to the sky. "Disperse your false ass right now!"

I stood my ground. Slowly, the winds died down, defeated.

I walked back to Union Station and slept soundly on a Greyhound bench.

---

It was an instant message long coming, and worth the wait: "I need your help."

"Oho! Cain summons his brother back from the dead! How fares the land of Nod, old pal o' mine?"

"Look, Bill and I have been working on the art for the second album, but you know neither one of us is the Photoshop Senior that you are..."

I stopped him in mid-sentence. "You know, my inbox is full of a LOT of spam today. And it appears to me, that most of it is being auto-forwarded from a particular array of addresses that YOU set up. And if memory serves, I asked you to turn said auto-forwarding off something like a year and a half ago."

"Chisa..."

"I'm just not sure I can free up any time to take care of your shit, man. You know how it is."

Ten minutes passed.

"Alright, it's fixed."

"Splendid. Now what was it you needed me to do? I seem to have an opening in my schedule this afternoon."

---

"Everything seems to have turned out right in the end."

"Except for Hologram," I said. "I would have liked to make it up to Philly for that. Can you imagine their faces? I can just hear Chronkite now: '...and would you believe after all this shit, the bastard shows up with a fucking Mac and just plugs right in! The absolute audacity.'" I paused. "It would have been been perfect, you know? Just perfect."

She leaned towards me, the cold of tarnished brass hitting my chest.

I looked down, surprised. "Where did you get that?"

Muggy smiled. "It's from the cuckoo clock, up there on the mantle. I think it's an appropriate talisman." She held it up for me to see; a simple chain harnessed the key around her neck.

"You've been researching my fetish," I mused. I grasped it between my fingers, rubbed it like a good luck coin, felt the history of clocks and mechanisms in it's metal, felt the excitement of sex in the promises of its presence.

I twirl it around in my fingers, winding an imaginary shaft in the air. The key dances under my fingers, turns and keeps things moving. Outside the door I hear the ambiance of Front Street, a short walk from the East End Cafe, where I am holding EIDE every Monday night. Outside the window I hear the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay, mere blocks from my third story bedroom on Long Beach Island. I hear Kupo composing in his Baltimore basement, dark and cold and full of memory; the loft above Safehouse, fog-smoky and resonating with the frequency of overlapping conversation; my childhood room in Prospect Park, with my old Timex Sinclair 1000 running 2K BASIC programs.

I'm walking station to station like David Bowie, at once in Emeryville, in Chicago, at 30th Street in Philly (twice), at Union Station in New Orleans (twice), in the possible fractal futures of Cape Cod and San Diego and Detroit separated by the thinnest quantum membrane, space guitars rippling through time like caramel in a sundae:

I went from Phoenix, Arizona
All the way to Tacoma
Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A.
Northern California, where the girls are warm
So I could hear my sweet baby say

Keep on rockin' me, baby
Keep on rockin' me, baby

I turn the key, winding the clockwork tension to full, and then release, the mainspring spiraling slowly outwards like a hurricane.

Wings' "Let 'Em In," Translated for Literature Majors

2010-04-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of people attempting entry to our abode.
Allow them.

Why Video Games Are Making Films Obsolete (But Not Books)

2009-09-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

I've never been a particularly big fan of movies. Sure, I have a few favorites from over the three and a half decades of my life, but I've also seen far less than your average person. Indeed, people are often shocked when they hear some of the movies I have not seen (included on that list: Akira, The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, The Princess Bride, The Goonies). Furthermore, most of the ones I have seen have been via television (in the forms of VHS, DVD or cable), whose tortured, senile death throes I have already discussed at length elsewhere on this blog.

The movie house, like the stage theater, is a dying space. Certainly it will always have its aficionados, but its usefulness as a provider of social memes and connecting experiences is decreasing every year. For starters, people have more options for experiencing film due to increased and increasing technological freedoms. No longer must the blockbuster movie come with the implied agreement of noisy audiences, gumshoe aisles, a ten-dollar ticket price and thirty minutes of commercials. Indeed, some filmmakers are now choosing to release DVD and online streaming version of their films concurrent with the "proper" theatrical release. The reasoning is simple: people want control of their media.

And that is exactly the reason why films are becoming obsolete, while their red-headed stepchild, video games, becomes more and more engaging. Films strip much of the control mechanism away from media by their very design. It's only now, faced with the extinction of their entire distribution network, that studios even allow for such alternate means of viewing experience. Films are passive, while video games (and, oddly enough, books, the precursor to film in the realm of narrative delivery) are interactive.

Wait, what? Did I just say that books are more interactive than films? I did. It's one of the many ways in which literature is superior to the cinema as a vessel for storytelling, and since you're clearly incredulous now, I'll explain why.

Books allow the reader control over the environment. When you read a book, you envision how the characters look based on the descriptions provided by the author. You envision how buildings, stretches of land, entire planets look via the author's cues -- but that is your envisioning. It's different from everyone else who reads the book. Until Lord of the Rings was a series of Peter Jackson films, no two people thought of Frodo as looking the same; of course, now that film has tainted our collective social consciousness, it's almost impossible to think of him as not looking like Elijah Wood. Film takes away your ability to create the environment for a narrative. (I've discussed that at length before, too.)

In contrast, a video game provides a fully-rendered environment, but gives you control of the action. In a video game, you control the character's path. The narrative is one that you provide yourself, choosing which direction to go next, which challenges to surmount. Many video games do indeed lead the player into a simplistic, linear path, but even those that do never play the game for you. Film does exactly that. In film, the viewer has neither control of the action nor the environment. The control mechanism is removed entirely, providing a purely passive experience.

Timing is another element of control that film robs from the viewer. In a book, you can linger on a page, a paragraph, or a sentence as long as you like, savoring the emotion of the moment that the words provide you. In a video game, you control the rate at which the character progresses, both in a literal and metaphorical sense; even games with a level timer do not ensure that you will use the exact amount of seconds to reach the end of the stage. But in film, timing is everything. Shots are timed to convey the performance required by the director. Cuts are editted to maximize the flow of the story by the producer. Films rarely escape the two-hour Golden Rule, which itself is timed so as not to risk conflicting with our biological clocks, since no one wants to go to the restroom in the middle of a film. Even the release of films is timed to meet up with summer movie habits or Oscar nominations; television does this too, with its tried-and-true "tune in next week" format to keep us coming back to the screen every week at the same hour.

All of these variables point to a very interesting trend: people are now deciding that they want control of their experiences. They no longer desire to be stuffed into a train car and taken, blindfolded, to their destination. They want to enjoy the journey; they want to conduct the train. This is exhibited in other forms of modern art as well, music being the immediate example. Mash-ups, covers and sampling have become commonplace. The line between producer and listener blurs more by the day. Bedroom composers create songs to rival the professionals; Jonathon Coulton, Owl City and Lady Wallace all have followings as large as any fly-by-night pop icon. Again, the reason is that technology is now so cheap and ubiquitous that the tools for anyone to become an auteur are readily available.

This points us to the other prevailing reason that film is going to die: it takes much more money to make a movie or a television show than it does to make a book or a video game. A-list stars, Redrock depth-of-field adapters, over-the-top CGI rendering, on-location site licensing, endless legions of producers and co-producers and executive producers -- all the things required to make a film add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. No book or video game has ever cost so much, though video games are getting close these days; Grand Theft Auto IV cost a whopping one hundred million to make, but that's an extreme exception, and on average a current generation console game costs about fifteen million, which is still nowhere near movie budgets. (For comparison, a hundred million in Hollywood will get you The Adventures of Pluto Nash.) Novels, it almost goes without saying, come nowhere near these costs; putting words on a page will set you back maybe a five thousand dollar investment.

What we have, then, is an entertainment industry which firstly costs more than any other to maintain, and secondly is no longer able to deliver the demands of its target audience. This is an equation for bankruptcy. Most damning of all is that the industry knows this; even Speilberg, Hollywood's messiah, is dumping buckets of money into exploring new options in 3D technology, just to keep his floundering artform fresh.

I do like film. I've gotten a number of grand experiences out of the medium of cinema. I can't, however, look the other way as that medium continues to vaunt itself as the arbiter of culture, when it is clear to me that its authority in such matters has become dubious and suspect.

Once, when I was visiting my mother, I found that her computer had a DVD playing program that would increase or decrease the speed of a film while keeping the audio the correct pitch; you could take a movie up to two hundred percent of its original speed without making the actors sound like chipmunks. Amused by the possibilities, I immediately decided to watch Star Wars Episode Two: Attack Of The Clones. At its normal speed, the bloated epic seemed merely forced and pompous; compressed to a single hour, however, it became a blistering onslaught of visual sensation akin to an acid trip. Lightsaber battles were resolved in a matter of seconds. Ponderous love scenes were now paced as frantic adolescent make-out sessions. Languorous dialogue became rapid-fire sarcasm. In truth, the movie was far more enjoyable than it had been in its official timing. But you'll never see it in the theater like that.

World of Patience

2009-07-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

I've been playing World of Warcraft for about six months now, after my pal Chronkite finally convinced me to try it. I don't consider myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination. There's certainly plenty of facets that I don't have any experience in (warrior class, dual talent trees, anything related to Outland or Northrend), but I've amassed far more knowledge about the game than the common non-player has at their disposal.

After the intoxicating Battlegrounds experience, I wanted a new challenge, something that was really bizarre. Sure, there were challenges waiting ahead in Burning Steppes and past the Dark Portal, but my highest toon (WoW slang for “character”) is a good 15 levels away from exploring those domains.

Then it hit me: what if I tried going through the game without killing anything? If I could get to level 80 without ever fighting, that would be so totally badass!

So I rolled a new toon. Without thinking too much about the dynamics of race and class attributes, I chose a human rogue, which ended up being a pretty decent choice (though in retrospect, night elf would have been far better, for reasons I'll try to explain later). I then set myself the following rule: I will not allow my Creatures Killed stat to rise above zero. In my first defiant act, I sold off my starter weapon. After all, I wouldn't be needing it.

---

It goes without saying that a game that is literally named “planet where the art of murdering is practiced” tends to lead the player into killing things. A good many of the available entry quests send you to outright slaughter wild pigs, encroaching kobold miners, giant moths, and a plethora of other species. Some players cheekily refer to these as the “racial cleansing” quests.

Additionally, a large percentage of the remaining quests have you fetch objects from various hostiles, such as candles, bandanas, vials of animal blood, or simply slabs of meat. For the most part (and I'll explain the exceptions below), you can't do these quests without killing the possessors of the objects first, so those are out as well.

So what's left? Well, in short:

- Courier quests. Many NPCs will send you to talk to another NPC across town, across the zone, in another zone, or even on another landmass. A subclass of this type of quest has you bring the NPC some sort of item, such as a note or needed supplies. Another subclass is when you get sent to find someone who has become lost in an area.

- Search quests. In this type of mission you go around an environment searching for things to pick up (like lost ship parts, a stolen heirloom or certain kinds of flowers) or to leave behind (such as taking a dead person's remains to be buried).

- Holiday quests. WoW has a number of in-game holidays that give players certain non-violent tasks to perform. For example, as of this writing the game is celebrating Midsummer, whose various activities include juggling torches, honoring flame keepers and – I swear I'm not kidding – pissing on the enemy's fires. The downside to these, of course, is that holidays are exceptions rather than continuous events.

To get enough XP (experience points, for the laymen) to go up to level 2, I had to run around to all four starting areas and do whatever quests I could do within these parameters. This in itself was particularly trying, due to these areas being quite far from one another. Getting from the mountainous dwarf lands to the island of the alien Draenei, for example, requires taking two boats and a tram. Additionally, since it is a world of warfare, things are trying to kill you all the time, and they don't seem to have much use for the Golden Rule. The dwarf / gnome starting area can only be accessed through a tunnel, and in the tunnel is an infestation of level 4 troggs. Level 4! It seems so dismissive from the perspective of a level 44, sword-swinging paladin, but to my new toon it was a sheer terror in Neanderthal form.

---

Here's a screenshot to show you what I had to work with:

Those of you who play WoW are doubtlessly laughing furiously right now due to the actionbar. For those that don't, here's a general explanation of what those buttons on the bottom left do.

[1] Eat cheese
[2] Drink healing potion
[3] Build a campfire
[4] Cook food
[5] Go fishing
[6] Pick flowers
[7] Mine mineral deposits
[8] Melt down minerals into ingots
[9] Teleport back to an inn
[0] Check my location coordinates
[-] Do a dance
[=] Bring out a little robot, who follows me around but does nothing (a free gift from our good friends at Mountain Dew. No, seriously.)

So: I can catch fish, cook and eat food, take drugs, set fires, dig up plants and rocks, play with pets, and boogie down. And I don't fight anything, and run away when attacked. I may be the first ever digital hippie.

I learned some fairly complex techniques pretty rapidly. The rogue has an ability called Stealth (the unlabeled button right above button 2), which allows me to sneak around largely undetected, but at half speed. The higher a creature is in level from me, though, the more likely they will spot me even in a cloaked state – and then, my only real remaining option is to run like Hell. This is actually where the night elf race would have had a better advantage; they have a racial ability called Shadowmeld, which is similar to Stealth, but also allows the player to break combat. A night elf rogue can use Shadowmeld to hide from an attacking enemy until their Stealth spell recharges, and then continue as before. The human racial, in contrast, is called Every Man For Himself, which breaks the toon free of movement constrictions such as traps or stun effects. It's decently useful in certain cases, but Shadowmeld would have been far more so.

Another thing I eventually realized was that some of the quests that required items from creatures could be done if I purchased the items rather than killed creatures for them. WoW has a number of Auction Houses, which are basically a sort of in-game eBay for trading armor, weapons and other things for gold pieces. This is where the first real test of my “virtual morality” came into play. After all, someone had to kill those Crag Boars to get the meat to sell to me, so am I just an enabler for killing by doing the quest at all? The game wasn't going to count it as my kill, though, and it's not like I could go back and un-kill the animal. Someone was going to buy that Crag Boar Meat, so it might as well be me!

But why single out quests? There are food items in the Auction House that can be consumed by players to regain health, and for the most part, those came from players who cooked it (using the Cooking skill). If it's a meat-based item, it's a done deal that someone killed something to make this meal. Should my toon become a vegetarian?

For that matter, why bother with the Auction House at all? I could simply log in under one of my other toons (my paladin, for example), kill some boars, loot their meat, and send it to the first toon using the in-game mail system. It wouldn't count under the pacifist's stats – but it would be me, the player, doing the killing regardless. It's the old Nazi closed circuit of responsibility, “I was only following orders” versus “I only gave orders, I never actually did anything.” How much functional schizophrenia was I willing to accept to fudge the rules?

It should be noted at this point that under normal (in other words, kill-happy) circumstances, a new toon takes about an hour or two to go from level 1 to 5. My conscientious objector toon took a full day to gain the same amount of experience. Much of this can be attributed to travel times between the sections I was able to acquire viable quests from. Additionally, sometimes a quest couldn't be done for logistical purposes; a gathering quest infested by level 4 monsters, for example, was inadvisable until I was at least level 4 myself, or they would have easily spotted me even under stealth. That meant I had to go find enough other quests to get me to level 4 just to do that quest. Rapidly my gameplay descended into a sort of fantasy flowchart, wherein I was always trying to get around the functional restrictions using any path available.

My biggest moment of doubt came on the night elf island, where I was sent on a quest to pull up plant seedlings before they mutated into lumbering elemental monsters. Since the seedlings are environmental objects and not actual monsters, I took the quest knowing that the game would not count a simple digging quest as creature kills – but when I got to the first seedling, my whole perspective took a sideswipe to the port quarter. Opening up the flower-like pods revealed a very human-looking face within, which twitched and glared nervously as it awaited its fate at my hand, unable to defend itself from my ultimate decision. I felt something in the pit of my stomach that I can only assume, if you'll excuse the arrogance of the assumption, was akin to how a mother feels when she makes the decision to abort her fetus.

However nebulous the ethical quandaries I might be faced with became due to my decision to play the game is this manner, I had in fact set for myself a very simple rule that could not be misinterpreted: do nothing that makes your Creature Kills stat rise above zero. Nothing I had done so far had broken that rule. I had to keep reminding myself that: I had done nothing to break the rule.

I pulled up the squirming seedling, along with eleven of its siblings.

---

I am not the first person to play WoW in this manner, nor even close to the best. Another player, whose toon is a gnome rogue known as Noor, has made it all the way to level 80, the current level cap for the latest expansion. I take solace in Noor's achievement, because it provides a most important proof of concept: you can go all the way to the top without killing a single creature.

The initial decision to play a non-combat character was not grounded in any moral structure. All I was thinking about was a single statistic on a character sheet; I literally only saw one defining numeral. As the journey towards that goal took shape, though, I found myself examining the fabric of morality itself, my actions and the decisions that guided those actions playing out in a simulated world where the shifting natures of hypocrisy and compromise became all too real considerations.

Chronkite, having heard about my strange experiment, decided to give it a whirl himself. He rolled a new toon, a Draenei priest. After an hour, he admitted defeat, praising me for my tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. If nothing else comes of this, I will at least have that rock to stand on: the patience required to keep my eyes on the prize as I play Animal Crossing in the midst of Duke Nukem, picking flowers while fighters and mages obliterate demons on the periphery of my sight.

Run for the Borders: a Modest Proposal for Books and Music in the 21st Century

2009-06-23T09:23:00.001-07:00

I like books, and I like music. Books have complex ideas rendered in text that can change the way you think; music has abstract expressions rendered in sound that can change the way you feel. Without stories and songs, life would be a very boring and frustrating place indeed.

I was born in 1974, and grew up in the 80s, and what I remember about books and music from my childhood was this: they were both relatively free. I spent many an hour at both my school and public libraries, poring over everything from reference materials about witchcraft to compilations of old folk song lyrics to The Day It Rained Cats Over Borneo. I spent an equal amount of time listening to the radio (AM radio and shortwave, no less!) grooving to the Axel F theme and Newcleus and UTFO, and lounging to Dreamweaver and Stranger On The Shore.

The reason I think of media and information as being relatively free is because that is quite simply my experience. It's only in modern times that we have begun to curtail media, to put locks and codes into it, to force its seekers to jump through a number of hoops before they can be allowed to have it. And usually, this entails money to a certain degree, but not as much as it entails holding down that mechanism of control, because more than anything power always acts to preserve its own encroached status quo. Put another way: it's not the fact that iTunes charges 99 cents a song that galls me. It's the fact that that system, now firmly entrenched, means that they can charge me whatever they damn well please. The 99 cents is a pittance; it's having to go through Apple to get to what I want that is the insult.

Intellectual property, in my admittedly less than humble view, is the invention of cowards who never had that many good ideas in the first place, and need a government hitman to protect the few ideas they have. No one corporation personifies this more than Disney, whom have actually made a very lucrative career out of rehashing the folk stories and mythologies of centuries past (The Little Mermaid, Hercules, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, etc. etc. -- with more on the horizon, including Rapunzel and John Carter of Mars). Unlike Alan Moore, whose League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reimagines these public domain figures from within its own set of parameters, thus leaving them free for others to use later, Disney hijacks the historical context of these stories in such a manner that no one can ever use Snow White, Tarzan or Peter Pan again without thinking of their "official" version. (To be fair, some are more effective than others; I don't think anyone is thinking of an anthropomorphic fox when they read Robin Hood. I would propose, however, that it happens more often than not.)

It also means that Disney gets to control what parts of their version of the public domain you get to see, and what parts you don't. For a good example, let's take a look at Song of the South, a Disney film based around the old Negro folk tales of Uncle Remus. It's never been released to video in the US, due to 'racially insensitive' material. Keep in mind that this is the same Disney that had no qualms casting Eddie Murphy in Mulan, or reimagining the the history of Native Americans in Pocahontas. In fact, one could make the argument that they refuse to release the film to video because it portrays minorities better than the films they've made since.

Two items in the news have given me the impetus to talk about these ideas. First, this article about a woman who has been charged nearly two million dollars in payments to the RIAA for pirating music. Two million dollars! Let's do some math here: the average number of songs on a CD is about 12. So let's take the 1700 songs this woman shared and divide it by 12.5: that's 136 compact discs. Assuming the average price of a CD to be $12.95, that gives us a whopping total of $1761.20.

So where does the 1.92 million dollar price tag come from? Well, remember that our unfortunate pirate was sharing said music, not just downloading it, which is how the RIAA justifies the losses. But let's do a little more math: $1.92 million divided by $1761.20 leaves us with the result that Thomas-Rasset would have had to share every one of those songs with 1090 people. You should have such good upload speeds!

(The pendantics among you will no doubt point out that since peer-to-peer is a non-linear mode, she could have uploaded them to, for example, only five people, whom then could have uploaded them to 218 people each, and the same effect is had. However, I would counter that she's hardly responsible for what other people decide to share. If someone sells a chef's knife, and the buyer uses it to stab someone to death, the knife salesman isn't going to be charged as an accessory.)

The point the RIAA is making here is that control of the distribution of music media is their firm purview, and infractions will be be met with the severest punishments. This brings me to item number two: apparently, Amazon doesn't even know its own DRM policy for Kindle. I'll admit I don't know much about Kindle, and the reason I don't is because I largely eschew e-books. Not that I haven't used them; I have an Acrobat Reader on my old Palm Tungsten C, and CDReader for comic books on every computer in the house (word to the wise: invest in a pivot monitor).

Still, I find it unnerving that you have to repurchase digital media when your number of licenses runs out. I'm actually borrowing a few books from acquaintances right now; thankfully, I don't see blank pages when I open up the tomes because I haven't been registered with the publisher. Again, this seems to me not to be a matter of the money; after all, if it was, they'd charge for every copy of the book on every device. They don't do that. They give you an arbitrary number of licenses for an arbitrary number of devices (six? I'd love to know what process that number was derived with), which are themselves open to wide interpretation so long as you're willing to jump through the customer service hoops. That's the point: they don't want you to pay more, they want you to jump through hoops.

Well, I don't want to jump through hoops. I am a grown-ass man.

So here's what I'm proposing: start stealing. I don't mean the mamby-pamby pseudo-stealing on the internet that everyone does and everyone has resolved is okay because nobody gets hurt. I mean real-ass stealing: shoplift CDs, and walk right out of the Barnes and Noble with a cookbook. So what if you get caught? Here's the facts: Shoplifting fines vary from state to state, but on the whole items under $300-$500 are considered petty theft. That means: you'll be fined for what you stole (usually only up to about double what you stole) and you may have to do jail time or community service.

That may sound harsh, but go back to that $1.92 million from earlier in the article and compare the two. One goes on your permanent record; the other permanently ruins your life. Which seems like less of a punishment? The industry has tipped its hand: they're far more worried about intellectual property than actual property. And why wouldn't they be? Once the records and books get to the shelves of your local Wal-Mart, they've already got their money; it's someone else's problem. By stealing their records and books, you're actually supporting the artists!

We must therefore cease all this downloading nonsense. The convenience of the the 21st century gadget society is no longer convenient. Let us return to CD players and bookshelves, and loot the stores like a New Orleans Katrina refugee.

Battlegrounds

2009-06-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

"I don't get it," I said, "I'm taking on red-level quests now and just flying through them. I even accidentally killed the boss from the next quest in the chain."

"Yeah, sounds about right," he said. "Face it, dude, you're ready for PvP."

"But I hate PvP," I protested. "The whole reason I play World of Warcraft is because I despise interacting with people. I don't want to romp around with a bunch of twelve-year-olds with the collective linguistic skill of a capybara."

"You're preachin' to the choir there," he countered, "but you've said it yourself: PvE is too easy. Levelling up isn't doing it for you. Even your vaunted soloing of 5-man dungeon crawls are getting boring. What else is there?"

I sighed. "Fine," I said, "I'll give it a try."

---

The Arathi Basin began to fill up with Horde preparing for battle. Visibly nervous, Oa tried to hide her inadequacy by handing out buffs to everyone; she figured it was a polite thing to do.

"You there, paladin!" yelled a mage. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Uh," stammered Oa, "I was just, y'know... figured I could help..."

"Blessing of Might is a melee buff," huffed the mage. "Do I look like a melee combatant to you?"

Oa felt like an idiot, but before she could respond, the gate opened. The Horde poured into the valley, splitting off into groups in order to capture the resource positions. Oa was rapidly left standing alone, having no idea what to do. She felt her heart jump to her throat. Stupidly, she stumbled out of the gate and ran towards the nearest outcropping of rocks to hide behind.

She could hear the sounds of battle over the ridge. Her teammates were engaging the enemy, and here she was cowering and hoping no one would find her. "I'm pathetic," she cursed herself. "Some paladin I am. I'm supposed to be a natural leader, but the only courage I have is when I'm fighting predictable foes. I'm a phony."

She heard a sound, a footstep. Timidly she peered over the ledge. There was a night elf on a cat mount; she hadn't even realized until then that she could use her mount. "He's alone," she thought to herself, "and he looks like a hunter. If I can surprise him, I might be able to take him." Steeling her reserve, she summoned her warhorse; the mighty steed leapt from behind the rocks with a fierce whinny.

"What the-" said the night elf aloud. He panicked and ran; Oa gave chase. Through the basin the hunter zig-zagged, trying to shake the paladin, but she stayed with him.

He rounded the stable house, disappearing from view. As Oa came around after him, he leapt off of his mount, sending his pet in to attack her. "Surprise!" he shouted, firing a volley of arrows at her -- and that was when Oa saw his teammate, another paladin, rushing up on her. Three against one.

Oa froze with fear for the briefest moment. She swung her Sword of Omen, let Judgements and Consecrations fly, tossed dynamite willy-nilly into the fray. She encased herself in a bubble and healed frantically. Her strategy was nonexistent; she was quite simply doing anything and everything she could to stay alive. The only driving force of her actions was the sheer terror of death.

Then it was over, and Oa was panting, and sweating, and she felt on the verge of tears. She heard another noise behind her and swung around; it was a blood elf, like her -- a hunter by the looks of him, walking up to where she stood. Behind him were a troll shaman and a tauren druid.

"Whoa," said the tauren, looking over the battlefield. At Oa's feet, three corpses laid bleeding into the fertile green earth.

The troll whistled. "Three on one," he said. "Pretty impressive."

The hunter said nothing, regarding Oa for a moment, then offering a simple nod.

Oa averted her eyes from them; she couldn't look them in the face. There was nothing heroic about what she had done -- she had moved from a position of cowardice to a position of backstabbing, and gotten in over her head, and got lucky. Saying nothing to the group, she mounted her steed again and rode away in a random direction, wanting only to get away from the site as quickly as possible.

The three Horde got on their mounts and followed her. She stopped, turning to them. "Why are you hassling me?" she demanded.

"I'm sorry!" yelped the troll, looking embarassed.

"We just, you know," started the tauren sheepishly, trailing off a bit before coming back to his train of thought, "...we figured you knew what you were doing, so we decided to back you up."

"You're a paladin," agreed the troll. "You're a natural leader."

---

"So you liked it, then."

"I had a blast," I said. "I don't know why I waited so long. I didn't do incredible, but I was in the top third of the rankings."

He laughed. "I knew you were going to love it. Don't get me wrong, PvE and dungeons have their place, but if you're not doing PvP, you're missing the greatest challenge."

"This may be hubris," I pondered, "but I almost feel like I know what real war feels like. Of course, I was never in any true danger; it's just a game. But for a game, it managed to scare me pretty shitless. Real combat isn't scripted. It's stochastic, like an earthquake."

"And like an earthquake," he added, "all you can do is ride it out and try to stay alive any way you can."

Generative Creativity Redux: Color Science

2009-05-19T14:35:00.001-07:00

The girls have a pair of orange tights that I can never figure out what to do with; for the most part, they only get used as part of the Velma Dinkley costume. Today I got in the mood for colored tights, and decided to pull them out.

Frustration ensued rapidly as combination after combination was dismissed. Then in a flash of inspiration, I got the idea to use a web site color scheme generator. Tools like these are designed to provide complementary color sets for layout and design jockeys that will be pleasing to the eye. After figuring out the hexadecimal code for the tights' specific shade of orange, I used the resultant palette as a guide for choosing pieces to go with them:

I was quite proud of the results, and eagerly shared them with a friend who is into fashion. She pointed me to a similar site, which after a very brief search turned up an almost identical palette to the one I'd used.

This sort of thing could really aid the fashion-impaired. A lot of people are afraid to try and match clothes because they don't feel competent at putting together pieces into a single outfit. By leaving the task up to the basic mathematical formulas of trichromacy, you can end up with really neat-looking combinations that will always look fresh. It would also be quite helpful for grassroots fashion designing sites like Spreadshirt, to ensure that your inks always match your fabrics. I believe I will be examining these and other related concepts in the near future.

The Deejay is a Necromancer

2009-05-05T03:16:00.000-07:00

The sound is alive. Rhythms jump from speaker to speaker, ping-ponging back and forth in the stereo image; sweeping drones surround the space with a thick alpaca wool blanket of ambiance. All systems of alchemy are expressed through three elements: physical matter, kinetic motion, and transmission of information (Paracelsus called it the Tria Prima). The vinyl record releases the encoded information into the physical bodies of the dancers, and biological systems synchronize to the analog time signature like drum machines slaved to a MIDI clock, powered by the feed of electric energy transformed to beats and melodies. Music is magic. Music is life.

Silence is death; there's a reason why radio jockeys call it "dead air". The signal dissolves to static; no information is sent, no direction is received. Separated from their commanding groove, the dancers flail, unsure and confused, falling dead to the sides of the club. Scramble, shuffle, get the next record on -- just get anything on. Forget about the slipmat. Nevermind the beat-matching. Genre is irrelevant; the sound must go on.

The new power source is incompatible. The dancers are yet unsure, assimilated to the previous tempo and tone color; they try to match the new dynamic, but it fights them, forces them into new shapes and motions. Minions are you, says the change, zombies and vampires, beholden to the flesh and blood I allow you to feed on for survival. You will be what I tell you to be; you willingly surrendered your rights to identity the moment you stepped into this domain of undeath.

Move! Like marionettes, like machines, the dancers translate the information into stilted, sweeping gestures. No more are they resolved to the concerns of the living; only the music matters. Everything must be sacrificed to the almighty god of rhythm. Dead bodies swarm the floor, animated by the precise application of needles to surfaces in the grand tradition of hypodermic injection. Doctor Frankenstein would stand in awe.

The selector looks up from the booth and smiles. His spell has worked; his army of hollow statues, meticulously aligned to one another like miniature cogs in a stopwatch, pulsates with the dynamic of a beating heart. He crossfades to the next track, never letting the seams in his surgical techniques show. The mix will never end; the dancer will never die. Noel Coward finally has his answer: the show must go on because the show is all that there is.

The New Magic, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Capitalism And Embrace Being Rich

2009-03-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has talked to me in the last year has undoubtedly heard me use the phrase "fuck you, I'm rich." While the inherent absurdity in the statement cannot be argued against, I am in fact dead serious about my belief that I am rich -- and like any good internet huckster, I'm now going to tell you the economic secrets I've unlocked for a one-time fee of only $19.95! No, just kidding, I'm not going to charge you. Why bother? I don't need your money -- I'm rich!

Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, our story starts back on, of all days, September 11th 2001, back when I was living in Newark, Delaware. After waking up at 2 PM and spending the next three hours attempting to figure out the new panicked world that had been thrust upon us all, I decided to take a walk for some perspective. I remember it being an unusually nice day, almost springlike. I took a walk to the 7Eleven on Elkton Road. There was a girl working there whom I'd had a short fling with, and she told me how she was scared for the future, and I hugged her and told her things were going to be okay.

Then, I bought a bag of Doritos -- the single most important bag of Doritos that has ever been purchased by anyone. Munching on the chips as I headed homeward, I found myself thinking: "wow, we're totally going to war soon, and war means food rations and saving your nylons and aluminum foil for the government. War means this might be the last bag of Doritos I ever eat in my life. I'd better savor them."

So I did. I savored every last bite of those chips, and as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, while everyone else kept an eye on Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq and Iran and Syria, I kept my eye on the availability of Doritos. My theory was: if there ever came a time that I could not easily acquire a bag of Doritos, I would know that the American paradigm had failed and I would then start to plan for alternatives. So long as I could get Doritos, though, I knew there was nothing to worry about, seeing as Doritos are the pinnacle of luxury spending -- a cheap, nutritionally suspect impulse buy that leaves one with nothing but trash when finished.

Thus the Doritos Index was born.

---

Fast forward to the present. I now work at a 7Eleven, this one in Tucson, Arizona. Every day I sell people booze, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and porn -- and of course, Doritos. We have eight flavors, ten if you count the newfangled Collisions bags as two separate flavors.

Collisions, for those who don't know, are a relatively new invention in Doritos technology. The idea is that you combine two complementary flavors of chips (for example, Buffalo Wing and Blue Cheese Dressing) in a single bag. Yes, dear friends, even with the economy looming on the edge of the abyss and two wars being raged in foreign countries, the Pepsi Corporation is committed to delivering you the absolute state of the art Doritos experience.

Jesus Christ, doesn't anyone else see what's wrong here? We are not in a depression! Depressions mean selling apples on the street and living in Hoovervilles! Look at your life: you're probably reading this on a supercomputer that is most likely sitting in your bedroom, or else a laptop in a coffee shop while you drink beverages cultivated from beans grown in Ethiopia. We have iPhones, iPods and Blackberrys. Porn is everywhere, and the most fashionable clothes are found in thrift stores for pennies on the dollar. Just today I heard that Apple is bringing Skype to the iPhone. That's right: we now have phones that emulate computers that emulate phones.

We live like kings. We should start acting like kings.

---

That's where the "fuck you, I'm rich" philosophy comes in.

First of all, before you can understand what it means to be rich, you need to understand exactly what money is. Money, in short, is a system of power transfer -- nothing more, nothing less. You put power into the system in the form of work, and you take power out of the system in the form of property (or, more accurately, property vouchers).

Put another way, think about how systems of magic work. Any Dungeons and Dragons geek knows that the basis of all magic in role playing games revolves around three attributes: material, gestural, and semantic. The material component can be just your own body, or it can involve reagents that need to be acquired such as runestones or gems or pelts of animals. The gestural component is the physical actions you perform: mixing potions, waving wands, or what have you. The semantic component is the language used to convey information, which can be spoken aloud or written in scrolls or sacred tomes. In any case, these three attributes always exist in magic: physical matter, kinetic action and transfer of information.

Now think about your job. You have to be present at a certain place in a certain time, whether it's showing up at an office or telecommuting from your home terminal, and you need various materials to do that job -- a laptop, a work smock, a boxcutter, whatever. You have to commit certain actions which constitute the physical work, whether it's moving a mouse in a CAD program or stocking boxes. You have to communicate with customers and with subordinates and managers and employers. Rapidly one can see how economics is itself a system of magic, because both systems employ material, gestural and semantic components to transfer power.

And after all of that, what do you get back? Scrolls! It may be in the form of a check or a direct deposit stub or as literal cash, but you always get a piece of paper detailing the exact amount of power you have generated, and the concurrent amount of power you are allowed to take out.

Seen in this light, capitalism is no moralistic issue, but rather an efficient and empowering tool. With money you can buy a car to travel farther and faster than you ever could on foot. You can buy a large screen television and view pictures from around the world or interact with entirely fantastic made-up environments. You can eat food that couldn't possibly be grown locally. You can refashion your own body with technological upgrades, and add makeup and costuming to turn you into another person entirely.

We live, in short, in the grandest and most rampant age of magic on record. The only thing that keeps us from seeing it is the belief that there is nobility in poverty. Nothing could be further from the truth.

---

Before you can shuck off those shackles of poor-think, though, there's another lesson to be learned. Now that you know what money is, you need to learn exactly how much of it you need.

As stated above, I sell a lot of lottery tickets to people. I find the lottery to be an asinine exercise, the very zenith of a mode of thinking that keeps people from realizing how rich they actually are. Particularly enraging are the folks who only buy tickets when the jackpot is above 100 million or so. I can just imagine the sympathy for the guy who accidentally buys a ticket and wins a mere ten million: "awwww, you poor, poor man. Tough luck, my friend."

One time I asked one of these folks: what's your plan for ten million dollars? I received an uninspired mishmash of half-answers: "pay off my bills, pay off my truck, maybe buy another truck, save some" -- all of which would represent perhaps $200,000 in funds, not even a single million. Eventually their meanderings ended in the inevitable "I don't know."

That, in a nutshell, is most people's first mistake about money: they don't have a clue about how much they actually need. Put another way, if you don't have a plan for what to do with ten million dollars -- or at least a vague idea -- then the exact amount of money you do not need is ten million and one dollars. A hundred million is nowhere on the discussion table.

And that's exactly why they remain poor. If you have no concept of how much you need, then by default you exist in a state of never having enough. The lottery is a prime example of how ridiculous a level this mode of thinking can be taken to: just what the Hell would you do if you actually won a hundred million dollars? Start your own space program? What could you ever possibly need that sheer amount of power for? By keeping people in a perpetual state of always thinking they need more money, those who have learned how to navigate the systems of power that the world has to offer can efficiently keep those people from ever becoming rich, no matter how much money they actually have.

Friends, there's a better way, and I'm going to tell it to you now.

---

The secret is to ACT LIKE YOU'RE RICH!

No matter how much money you have, no matter how many bills you have to pay, no matter how many hours you work, START THINKING LIKE YOU'RE RICH RIGHT NOW.

Say you have ten dollars in your pocket. If you use that ten dollars to pay off a fifty dollar cable bill, you are not rich. The cable company is not going to turn your cable back on for a partial payment; you have basically given them a free power transfer for no benefit to yourself.

BUT, if you use that ten dollars to buy ten one dollar burgers and eat them all in one sitting and then THROW UP because you ate too much, YOU SIR ARE RICH!

I'm going to now tell you about one of the richest people I know. He goes by the name Sky, and he's a customer at our store. He comes in and buys burritos and Mountain Dew Code Red Big Gulps with food stamps. He is homeless.

Once, Sky found a week long bus pass lying around at a bus terminal. He picked the pass up and rode the bus for a week. Let me explain that again: he rode the bus for a week just because he could. He had no destination in mind. He didn't use it to get from point a to point b. The destination was the bus itself. He decided that the best use of this bus pass was to actually use as much of it as possible, so he spent a week riding around all over the city, playing his PSP, and then getting off and trying out another bus route for a while. He did this for a whole week.

That action alone is far and away richer than most people I know that own their own houses! The bus pass was not a means to an end: it was the end itself. THAT is thinking like a rich person.

---

Now, before you start thinking that this is some sort of Ayn Rand uber-capitalism notion, let me state that nothing could be further from the "Fuck You, I'm Rich" philosophy. One of the truly rich things you can do with your money is GIVE IT AWAY. When you start thinking like a truly rich person, you will be amazed at how much compassion and altruism naturally come about in your life.

At its essence, the "Fuck You, I'm Rich" philosophy is almost an exploit of Buddhism. Think of it this way: if you always have enough money for what you need, then you have no attachment to any one thing you need. You can always just get another. Since you have no attachment to any one thing, then you have no attachment to anything. You are free to simply become action.

Viewed from this perspective, it is easy to see how a rich mindset naturally produces charity for others. If you're not worried about money, you may as well give it away! I've often found that the absolute richest things I can do are pay for a friend's meal or buy someone something they can't otherwise afford. One friend whom has taken this philosophy to heart noted: the net amount of wealth in the world increases ones own individual capacity to be rich. By giving to the poor you are actually increasing your own richness, since money is activated power transfer, and you are the one directing the power.

Sometimes I'll offer to pay more for something on principle alone. The ironic thing is, when I try to do this, I often get a discount! When people recognize that you are rich, they will bend over backward to get you the things you need. Here's true story that illustrates an interesting example of that: my domestic partner and I recently had to transfer her medications to a new pharmacy so that she could continue to get them by mail. We had to go out to the supermarket where the pharmacy was, and there was an issue with her medical discount card. The pharmacists basically treated us like lepers because they thought we were poor, due to the discount card not working.

After a few runarounds with the insurance company and the pharmacy I finally just said: "How much to pay for these in cash?"

"That's very expensive, sir," said the female pharmacist at the counter.

"That's not the question I asked you. How much?"

She rang them up and told me the total, which was in excess of $500. I said, "Fine, please fill these perscriptions, we'll be back to pick them up in about ten or fifteen minutes." Then we went back into the market and browsed while we waited.

Suddenly, a man in a lab coat came running -- yes, literally running -- up the aisle at us. "Hey, are you the folks that just filled these prescriptions?"

"Yes, that's us," I said.

"Well, I just thought you should know that we have a discount program of our own through the market. If you like I can get the paperwork started for you now while you wait!"

I blinked, looked at my partner, looked back at the pharmacist. "Yes," I said, "that would be fine." We then got a tremendous discount on the medicine, easily over half the cost, because the perception of us had radically changed once I revealed that the amount of money was not going to stop us from acquiring what we needed. Suddenly we were no longer poor people who couldn't afford the medicines; we were rich people who could afford whatever we damn well pleased, and as such, we deserved respect.

We did deserve respect, because all people do. The problem lies in that they usually don't respect themselves first. No more: now everyone, everywhere can act like they're rich.

---

So, Chisa, how can *I* start acting like I'm rich today?

The first thing you need to do is realize that any amount of money you have is power. The amount itself is meaningless; a penny or a dollar or a hundred dollars or a million dollars are all just levels of power transfer, but if you have any amount of money at all, you are in the power transfer system! You have magic in your pocket and it is up to you, and no one else, to decide how to use it.

The second thing you need to do is figure out what you want to really, truly do with your power. Maybe you want to be a rock star. Maybe you want to write a great novel. Maybe you want to be a lawyer and represent corporations. Maybe you want to design the fastest car ever, and then break the land speed record driving it. Maybe it's doing nothing at all and lying around on your fat ass playing video games! It doesn't matter; the point is figuring out what it is and understanding that the only thing keeping you from it is the amount of power transfer required to get to that goal.

The third thing you need to do is put your power into achieving the goal. If you need more power, acquire it by whatever means are available. Remember that you always have options because your power is yours, not someone else's. If you have to let a bill slide for two months to get yourself to a position you need to be in, then LET THAT FUCKER SLIDE.

I'm not saying you shouldn't pay your bills, mind you; one of the richest things you can possibly have is NO DEBT. I haven't had a credit card for my entire life. I do have a Visa debit card now, tied to my bank account, but if I overdraft it comes from my savings, not a credit card company. Think about that: I am so rich the overdraft protection for my bank account is my OTHER bank account.

What I am saying is that if you want to be truly rich, then your first and foremost focus should be getting the things done that you truly need to do. Another friend once noted: life gives us all homework assignments that have to be turned in before death. This essentially is the "Fuck You, I'm Rich" philosophy distilled to its purest form. Whether or not you believe that your life has meaning or reason or purpose, it does have a self-directed goal, even if that goal is "do as little as possible." It's your duty to see that goal reached, but you can't ever do that if your default mode of thinking is that you're too poor to accomplish anything.

So for Pete's sake, START ACTING RICH!

Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back," Translated for Literature Majors

2008-10-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

I am fond of oversized hindquarters, and I am unable to falsify this information.
Neither may you fraternal acquaintances offer renouncement,
for when a young female enters, possessing a notably reduced midriff
and a posterior so rotund as to be forthright,
your male member becomes erect, and thusly, you desire to remove it from your trousers
due to the fact that you have become aware of the aforementioned plump dorsal section
which is immersed within a pair of denim dungarees.
I admit addiction to this situation, for I cannot avert my eyes.
Dear maiden, I desire to be close to you
so that I might capture your likeness on a photographic plate.
Compatriots of mine advise caution;
however, I find the derriere that is attached to you incredibly erotic.
O! Thee with the backside of velvety tegument,
do you indicate that you would enter my Mercedes?
Then I beseech: manipulate me to your own ends,
for I believe you to be superior to my usual hangers-on.
I have witnessed how she undulates;
a pox on courtship!
She perspires to a degree that soaks her vestments,
resembling, in her tenacity, a Chevrolet with forced-induction combustion.
I grow weary of periodicals
which report that planar backsides have become chic.
Approach any African male and inquire whether he agrees.
Verily, he will report the opposite.
I ask you, my comrades,
do the loves of your lives retain lipids within their haunches?
If so, you must implore them to agitate them,
for doing so will illustrate their wellness.
Indeed, my darling has a large keister.

Knight Grand Cross Whom Combines Frequently - Indeed, My Darling Has A Large Keister

Generative Creativity

2008-08-13T11:47:00.001-07:00

I came up with a GREAT technique for naming characters:

1. Go to http://www.random.org/integers/ and generate 2 integers from 1 to 1000.
2. Go to http://names.mongabay.com/female_names.htm and use the first number for the first name (for girls; there's also a page for guys in the menubar).
3. Go to http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm and use the second number for the last name.

This can also be a good creative tool in general, for stimulating the imagination; generate a name, then come up with the persona based on it. Geoffrey Manning, for example, is a low-level sysadmin with dreams of one day becoming a star in the blogosphere, but this will never happen seeing as he only ever blogs about his cat's human-like qualities, his female acquaintances' cat-like qualities, and the fact that repeated consumptions of burritos continue in deference to his horrible bowel issues. He is played by Stephen Root, or possibly Jack Black if the director can get him to closely emulate "reserved".

Then there's Cathy Sexton, a tortured high school sophomore who carries a rather unfortunate surname in contrast to the fact that she is still a virgin. She wears thick-rimmed, leopard-print glasses, carries a My Little Pony backpack, and will be the victim of exactly one rape scene. Played by someone born no earlier than 1986 who is NOT Lindsey Lohan.

Dianna Ryan is a daytime soap opera actress with raven-black hair, a sort of semi-permanent sneer (even when she smiles; especially when she smiles), and a penchant for purses that cost more than her entire net worth.

Oscar Padilla: wildly eccentric millionaire, balding, harbors a deep desire to be the first man to walk on the surface of the sun.

And finally, Elsa Trevino... she's a hard one to pin down. Some days she's like a whisper on winds, carried farther down the lane than was ever intended, a secret on shivers that teases far more. Other days, she a fucking cunt. In any case, she works at a local independent record store, has more De La Soul albums than the artists themselves, and never wears shorter than a two-inch heel in any occasion.

Threading then all together, the soap opera star is totally whoring herself to the millionaire so that she'll get his money when he kicks the bucket. The sysadmin works somewhere within the millionaire's corporate hegemony, and dates the record clerk, who has the high schooler as a regular customer.

Beginnings of a story right there, from a mere ten random numbers. Solid.

UPDATE: our ever-selfless pal cxreg has cobbled together a wedge page to automate the process described in this post. I thank you from the bottom of my pancreas, cxreg, as do the newly-generated Cora Sanchez, Rod Lawson, Silas Drake and Janine Hammond.

The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized

2008-06-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."
-- Orson Welles

While I was at Value Village a few days ago tracking down some costume pieces to use in a set of Scooby-Doo inspired mannequins photos, I stumbled across an old Gemini KM200 "rabbit-ears" antenna. I haven't watched television regularly for over a decade, due to a combination of factors: lack of decent programming, increasingly schizophrenic advertising, sporadic broadcast availability, a wide variety of optional media outlets (cable, satellite, DVD rentals, bittorrent). What was once the major technological method of information and entertainment acquisition has become increasingly sidelined, almost to the point of obsolescence.

The FCC apparently agrees; in less than a year (specifically, on February 17, 2009) analog television broadcasting will cease to exist. I find myself saddened by the end of this era; even though television and I parted ways over a decade ago, I have to admit that the boob tube has had a significant impact on my cultural identity. I cut my teeth on Star Blazers and Mister Roger's Neighborhood, ran home from elementary school for Pink Panther and Inspector Gadget, woke up early to catch Robotech before middle school, spent my lonesome preteen nights with Doctor Who and Monty Python, clung to The Real Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for support through boarding school, and took solace in Red Dwarf and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during the madness years following graduation.

I decided to buy the antenna. My desktop has a capture card with a built-in tuner, which usually goes unused. Using a very simple adapter, I could hook the old dipole receiver into the cable-ready port on the back of my box. I would catalog this final year of television, writing down its memoirs before it passes into oblivion, like an old, dying parent in a nursing home.

---

The antenna is incongruous against the rest of the equipment on my desk: a huge metal sculpture reaching up to the sky like some abstract Rocky statue, praising the heavens and praying for the blessed signal to be bestowed. Behind it and off to the right sits the desktop's wifi-G adapter, whose own antenna, in contrast, is blue, plastic, and only three inches long. Its stubby transceiver, barely visible from the chair, looks like the smart kid in the back of the class raising his hand politely and patiently, while in front of him this drama queen of silver and height is flailing her arms for attention: I'm the Princess! Everyone look over here, I have something important to say! There's a sale at Macy's, half off blouses and skirts.

The first experiment was very rough. Tucson has a number of broadcast stations and television translators (lower-power relay stations which piggyback a larger station's signal onto another channel), but the capture card's auto-tuner could only find six stations with a decent amount of signal:

13 KOLD - CBS
16 KGUN - ABC (translator)
18 KTTU - MyTV
27 KUAS - PBS (translator)
29 KPCE - Daystar
40 KHRR - Telemundo

Nowhere to be found was the old standby NBC, nor any Fox or CW affiliates -- well, unless you count MyTV. I was unfamiliar with this network, so I did some research: when WB and UPN merged in 2006 to form CW, several UPN stations were lost to Fox. Fox turned these stations into a new network called MyNetworkTV (or MyTV for short), following on the coattails of their acquisition of the MySpace internet brand.

The other station I didn't recognize was Daystar, but it only took a single Google search to determine why: it's a Christian network. Easily the loudest and clearest signal of the bunch, Daystar was ironically ignored by my card's auto-tuner. I begrudgingly added it manually, resolving I could not be biased in my historical accounts.

I began flipping around the dial. At 11 AM on a Wednesday, the choices were:

- a paid Christian program
- another Christian program
- a soap opera
- another soap opera, in Spanish
- the news
- Barney and Friends

No reruns of McHale's Navy? No 321 Contact? No Press Your Luck? What sort of mad nightmare mediascape was this?

A couple of hours later, it wasn't any better. I checked the various networks' schedules for the rest of the evening, and then the rest of the week. What I found was a slew of ill-conceived reality shows, a smattering of sitcoms with only slightly more realistic premises, some paranoid doctor and crime dramas, and 'investigative' (read: exploitative) news programs.

I was stunned. I knew television had gotten bad (when that Lost crap is your biggest draw, you're clearly on the down stroke) but I never imagined that the horrors had sunk so miserably low. There were no stories, no narratives, no characters that you could learn to love or learn to hate. All that remained was a diorama of horrible fuckups: pedophiles on hidden cameras, washed-up celebrities forced to degrade themselves like heroin junkies for one more brief glimmer in the spotlight, asshole citizens assaulted by asshole criminals who get booked by asshole cops to be defended by asshole lawyers in front of asshole judges -- and then there's Flavor Flav.

Disgusted, I shut the damn thing off, and returned to watching Xvid rips of old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

---

I walked home from the Friday graveyard shift listening to Boards of Canada on my Palm Tungsten C. The resonant chords and loping beats, like hip hop produced by Eeyore, complimented the early morning sunrise in the monsoon-soaked humidity.

It was Saturday morning; I entered my home, slung the backpack off, and sat down at the desktop. Saturday mornings had always been a joyous childhood time, even during the harshest points of my life. Adults, worked to exhaustion five days a week, slept in on Saturdays, which meant if you were enterprising and ninja-quiet, you could help yourself to a breakfast of cold pizza and while away the next few hours with the Shirt Tales, the Mighty Orbots and Kidd Video.

I fired up the capture card and ran the auto-tuner again. It deemed KXBA 58, a CW affiliate, was now worthy of signal recognition. It was 7 AM; time to watch cartoons. Surely that old stalwart bastion of childhood had not yet gone the way of the dodo?

Wrong again!

What I found in lieu of the Cosby Kids and Pee Wee's Playhouse was a batch of lame garbage: Disney's The Emperor's New School, Beakman's World, a rehashing of the Care Bears, some crap called Will and Dewitt -- and for some reason, they all had an "e/i" logo in the upper right hand corner.

"e/i" stands for "educational and informative", and was created out of the Children's Television Act of 1990. Networks are required to broadcast at least three hours of e/i children's programming per week, and virtually all of this falls in the slot previously used for Saturday morning cartoons. While I applaud the spirit of the initiative, hardly any of these shows could be considered to have even a remote educational value, unless they are intended for retarded children; of the samples I viewed, only Beakman's World seems to take the notion with any seriousness, but, to be blunt, it's really just a poor man's Bill Nye, who in turn is a poor man's Mr. Wizard, who in turn is a poor man's Julius Sumner Miller.

Surely this can't be all kids have to look forward to on the weekend? The whole point of showing cartoons on Saturday is because kids don't have school then -- you know, that place where they're supposed to get an education. I delved deeper into the Saturday programming:

- CBS's lineup has been reduced to a faggoty land of unicorns and rainbows, with Strawberry Shortcake, an animated Sabrina the Teenage Witch, an adaptation of the Madeline children's book series, and something called Horseland which is even too god damned gay for me to explain.

- ABC now relies almost entirely on live-action teen comedies like Hannah Montana, That's So Raven and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. Only Power Rangers: Jungle Fury approaches anything resembling a classic Saturday morning cartoon, and frankly I was surprised that Americanized Super Sentai clones were still being produced.

- MyTV, owned by Fox, leaves the responsibility of programming the e/i block entirely to its affiliates.

- As for the CW, well... give credit where credit is due, I always say. They seem to be the final holdout of the old ways, with treasured friends like Spider-Man, Batman and Tom and Jerry gracing their 7-to-noon block -- ironic, considering they're one of the newest networks.

No wonder teenagers are so intolerable these days! If I'd had this tripe for my weekend breather as a child, I'd probably have turned into an douchebag, too. I remember crying like a baby when I discovered that Galaxy High School had gone off the air. If only I'd known then what I know now: 'tis better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all.

---

Television is dying, and I believe that it deserves to die. Of course, linear media itself isn't going anywhere; I've followed loads of webcasting, from Ronald Jenkees' haphazardly recorded phat jams to the BBC's Scream of the Shalka production. Storytelling and narrative are both still out there, but the production and distribution models have taken radical turns in the last ten years. In 1998 you could barely get 25 megabytes of free web space for some low-bitrate MP3s of the awful trance music we were squeaking out in ReBirth -- and forget about online video.

Like that old, dying parent I mentioned at the beginning of this post, television has become increasingly dissociative in its old age, as the dozen medications that salve its death pangs -- corporate mergers, advertising slogans, genre overhauls -- create unexpected chemical interactions when taken together, leaving behind a wrecked, frail husk of former dignities... Where's my wife? Who are you people? How did you get into my house?

Yet, before the end, we can still reminisce on the nostalgia of years past, on the good times when things were wholesome and pure -- after all, this whole adventure started when I decided to dress up Roku like Velma Dinkley. And who didn't have a crush on Velma, really? Oh sure, Daphne was the hotpants of the outfit, but every kid knew that Velma was where the action was at: while Freddy was tongue-wrestling with Miss Blake in the back of the Mystery Machine, and stoner Shaggy dropped so much acid that he saw ghosts and thought his dog could talk, Velma was out kicking ass and taking names. Not bad for a petite nerd girl who couldn't see shit without her glasses.

That's what I'll do, as the arbiter of culture passes into the electronic netherworld: I'll dress up my mannequins like friends from programs past, downloading their adventures from Pirate Bay or picking their DVDs up from Amazon on my credit card. That's how I'll remember television, on that fateful day in February, when the on-call doctor arrives to pull the plug.

Regarding Window Displays

2008-05-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I've been collecting mannequins since 2000 and have had an interest in them all my life. I can identify the brand of a mannequin from 75 yards away, and if it's a Rootstein or a Decter I probably know the model number. I have extended understanding of the economics of visual merchandising, watch fashion trends closely, and have a keen eye for artistry. In short, I'm pretty much an expert on window displays.

Very few things anger me more than seeing a store that is using their mannequins poorly. A local store (which shall remain nameless) has in their window two Rootstein mannequins. The Rootstein brand, for those not in the know, is the pinnacle of quality in the mannequin world; a fifteen-year-old fiberglass Rootstein is worth more than a brand new "eggshell" made cheaply out of plastic in a factory in Korea. A Rootstein immediately brings a sense of elegance and class to a store, which is why it pisses me off that the aforementioned local shop sets theirs up so haphazardly.

Here are a few tips for aspiring visual merchandisers and mom-and-pop thrift junkies:

BRUSH THE WIGS. This is the absolute simplest way to improve the quality of a diorama. People want to see themselves in your displays; they want something that engages both their sense of aesthetics and their humanness. If your mannequins don't look like real people, the illusion is lost, and the quickest way to ensure that they don't look like a bunch of heroin junkies who just fell off the bus to Salt Lake City is to brush their hair. Think of how presentable you make yourself in the morning: if you came to work with unruly, sticking-up hair, you'd look like a complete asshole. No one wants a cashier that looks that way, so why would they appreciate a model with the same unkempt look?

USE SHOES. Unless your target demographic is hippies or Jains, pretty much everyone you want to sell to wears shoes. Again, people want to see themselves in the window. A shoeless mannequin looks incomplete, unfinished, half-dressed. Even if your store doesn't sell shoes, get one or two pairs per model to match any potential outfits. A black dress pair and a white casual pair will do. And make sure you use flats for flat-footed mannequins and heels for heel-footed mannequins, or else you'll look like a bumbling amateur.

ACCESSORIZE. Anything the human body can wear, a mannequin can wear. Necklaces, hair barrettes, bracelets, opaque tights, earrings -- all these things show a person behind the imagery, someone who wants to dress a certain way to convey a certain statement. Just one pair of black-rimmed glasses will add a sense of depth to your entire mannequin line. Even things like iPods and headphones can turn a normal ho-hum display into a cheeky subway scene.

UNDERSTAND PLACEMENT. If your store is having a sale, don't tape the sale sign up in the same window as your display. That misses the point of having a display. Why bother spending an hour on a scene box if you're only going to obscure it with some humongous poster? It's terrible form.

ENGAGE THE CUSTOMER. The whole point of having mannequins is to generate interest and invite potential sales. Don't just dress the girls and prop them up; do something creative and unorthodox to grab the customer's attention. Say your store is next to a coffee shop; you can buy some cups from them, set up a table and chairs in your window, and make it look as if the mannequins stepped out for a coffee break when no one was looking. Not only is it free advertising for your neighbor (which they'll likely appreciate), it draws the eyes of their customers to your store, and the lighthearted nature of the diorama will soften their hearts and open their wallets.

These seem like simple ideas, but you'd be surprised how many visual merchandisers pass right over them. Many stores treat their displays like they're mopping the floor or stocking boxes: their only aim is to get the job done with the minimum amount of effort. However, in the world of artistry, the amount of effort put into a piece is often proportional to the enjoyment derived from it. If you're going to bother to have good mannequins (or, really, mannequins at all), you ought to bother to make them look good as well. It is not enough to merely own the Stradivarius; without regular playing, the violin becomes brittle and dry, and the beautiful music it once produced turns to sour whining.

Commonalities of “Proper” Religions

2008-04-21T05:38:00.001-07:00

Walking to work today, I noticed a number of flyers along the way decrying the evils of Scientology, posted by local members of Anonymous. I took most of them down, because I was deeply offended by this absurd media notion of a “war” on Scientology. There is no war on Scientology until someone gets blown up. That's what war is: killing people who don't agree with your ideas. There are no Internet suicide bombers taking out Scientology clinics; there have been no drive-by shootings at anime conventions by Dianetics zealots. Unless you have killing, you don't have war. You merely have a debate of increasing levels of impoliteness and rhetoric, which ends either when someone brings out the swords or everyone shuffles home in cowardice.

Then it occurred to me: what would it take to get a Scientologist to kill someone for his beliefs? Sure, I've heard horror stories about Scientology members dying from negligence, but in my estimation it doesn't count when you kill your own flock, or else Jim Jones and those Hale-Bopp aficionados in the black Nikes would have more historical respect. Real religious fanatics kill other people.

Do all “true” religions (i.e. the ones that get the 501c tax breaks) have assassins? We certainly know the Jews killed plenty of people; their own books laud their massacres like football scores in a sports almanac. One need look no further than the Bhagavad Gita to implicate the Hindus. Certainly those Buddhist monks don't need all that Shaolin kung fu for spreading Dharma. As for the Christians, don't even get me started about the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the conquest of Mesoamerica...

It wouldn't be so galling if these same churches didn't constantly claim to be religions of peace. For the most part, I find that the more someone feels compelled to tell you how peaceful their religion is, the less peaceful it actually is. For example, the Rastafari (and here I mean the true practitioners in the lineage of the Burru men, not your local Stoned White Guy With Dreadlocks And A Tie-Dyed Bob Marley Shirt) almost never feel the need to explain how peaceful their beliefs are; the beliefs themselves do that for them. On the other hand, Muslims constantly talk about Islam being a religion of peace, almost to the level that one wonders if they're trying to convince themselves as well.

You can make the argument that assassins are the rogue zealots of faith and operate independently of the “pure” believers, but that's a convenient cop-out. In truth, no one likes to be told that they need to get their house in order. If violent fanatics call themselves Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, etc. then it's unarguably the responsibility of everyone else who bears that classification to pull these antisocial elements aside and straighten them out. Sitting on your balcony sucking your teeth in disapproval will not keep Kitty Genovese from getting raped.

In summation: if you kill other people then you're in a religion, but if you only kill your own members then you're in a cult. If you don't kill anyone, you're probably just a hapless ascetic.

The Rational Christ

2008-04-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

The collection of books we call the Bible is actually an arbitrary anthology, and references a number of other books in its own texts that have since fallen into the realm of apocrypha: The Book of the Wars of the Lord, The Sayings of the Seers, The Gospel of Perfection, The Covenant Code, etc. These texts were not accidentally dismissed. There are surviving decrees from the Church of Rome ordering various texts to be burned if they contradicted with their established order; ironically these are the only documents that provide us historical record of the existence of these texts.

Fast-forward to the Drug War. While caffeine, taurine, nicotine and alcohol remain freely available or very loosely controlled (evidenced by the ATF bottom-feeder practice of stinging the common minimart clerk rather than the tobacco lobbyist), all psychedelics -- LSD, cannabis, MDMA, etc. -- are strictly controlled substances. This is no coincidence: the substances that decrease the possibility of organized revolution are allowed, while the ones that incite free thinking are demonized. You can hardly blame the powers that be, since it's pretty hard for people to find a reason to get up and go to work in the morning once they realize that they're actually infinitely powerful cosmic beings in a larval stage.

There's no difference between these methodologies. There is only one conspiracy, throughout time immemorial, regardless of whatever incidental material encumbrances its wielders have acquired, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Third Reich to the Vietnam draft to the Patriot Act: the pervasive belief that you do not possess the authority, the ability or the agency to make decisions for your own body. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Christ was not a God to be worshiped or a savior to surrender one's temerity to; he was a blueprint to be overlaid over oneself. "I am the way and the light" is not a sentence that contains a personal pronoun. The "I" is the way; myself is the light; the body furnace that the alchemical Rosicrucians called "athenor" knows itself best as a vessel for transmuting the vile metals into perfect gold.

The true and proper Christian -- in fact the proper practitioner of any belief system: Muslim Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Masoretic Kaballah, the Socratic Method, all truth-seeking sciences and alchemical schools since Ibn al-Haytham, etc. -- draws a clear distinction between submission to God and surrender to God, just as the collarable BDSM slave knows the difference between a Master and a Control Freak.

"Through God all things are possible." (Matthew 19:26)

Jesus isn't coming back, friends; he's already here. He's you.