Well, I guess I am a rather interesting man — refined, intelligent.  But that stomach, that stomach!  (Baron Cefalù)

You never know what caprice will keep you away from a movie, and what whim will draw you in.  Even during the last few years, when I’ve finally gotten around to educating myself on the remarkably rich history of Italian cinema, I’ve kept Divorce, Italian Style at arm’s length, thanks to a truly unfortunate title which, while essentially accurate, conjured up unpleasant memories of a specific type of insipid TV comedy in the 1970s.  And what finally convinced me to give it a try wasn’t its good reputation, or the recommendation of any number of film-nerd friends with excellent taste who assured me it would be worth my while; it was the fact that when the Criterion Collection released a fancy new edition of the film, the box design was by Jaime Hernandez, a brilliant illustrator and one of my favorite comics artists of all time.  It would pretty depressing to figure out how frequently we cheat ourselves out of pleasure for just such arbitrary reasons.

Anyway, to the matter at hand:  Divorce, Italian Style, filmed in 1961, was directed and co-written by Pietro Germi.  His early work was apparently in the Italian neorealist style that yielded so many gems in the post-war years, though I’ve seen only one of them (apparently his last) — 1957′s L’Uomo di Paglia, a solid but unspectacular romantic drama set in working-class Sicily.  The island is the place where Divorce unfolds as well:  southern Italy in a yellow-stained nutshell, a town of 18,000 with a literacy rate hovering somewhere around 20%, where the Communist Party hosts Sputnik dances, and where the heavy hand of the Church blocks movement in any direction.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Baron Ferdinando Cefalù, a down-at-the-heels nobleman, as either a perfect evocation of a louche aristocrat or a broad cartoon of a louche aristocrat.  (It’s a tough call for me, honestly, since my experience of louche aristocrats is confined to having once seen George W. Bush drive past during a St. Patrick’s Day parade.)  Cefalù is a slightly more well-behaved Gomez Addams:  he wears neat suits that are just beginning to frazzle, puffs on cigarettes through an ornate holder, and sports a trim mustache and heavily Brylcreemed hair.  In one of Germi’s more pointed satirical observations, the life of this broken-down aristo isn’t all that different from the deprived leisure of the town’s unemployed men, or the chattering old hangers-on who speculate about everyone’s love life.  In Cefalù’s case, he suffers from a deep resentment of his aunt’s bourgeois husband (who occupies half of his ancestral lands, having paid off Cefalù’s father’s gross gambling debts), but lusts after the man’s daughter, the utterly gorgeous teenage Angela (played by the utterly gorgeous teenage Stefania Sandrelli).

Unfortunately for him, Cefalù is already married to the randy but shrill Daniela Rocca, and in a movie saturated with notions of the Church getting in the way of what people want, what they’re keeping him from is being shed of Rocca and hooking up with Angela.  In an era when we’ve come to mistake complicated storytelling with effective storytelling, Germi does a fine job of presenting us with a lovely execution of the age-old trick of establishing the protagonist’s desire and forever yanking it away from him.  It soon becomes clear, through a series of luridly crazed fantasies, that Cefalù’s preferred solution is to have someone seduce his wife, catch them in the act, and kill them both — those fine humanitarians in the Church will forgive a “crime of passion”, but not the dissolution of a failed marriage by divorce.  That’s when it becomes clear that the title isn’t just a goof that loses its punch in the cultural translation:   in 1961 Sicily, an Italian divorce is a euphemism for murder.

Describing the comedy in Divorce, Italian Style as satire is accurate to a degree, but Germi puts a lot of the sharper edges in the background.  A lot of the jokes, and especially the character work (as with Rocca, Cefalù’s wallflower sister and her gurning clown of a fiance, and many other of the village idiots), are pretty broad, but other times, he slips in some unexpectedly sophisticated humor.  (One moment early in the film, where Mastroianni modulates the volume of his voice-over, as if he fears his wife will hear him thinking about Angela, really caught me by surprise.)  His background in realism, too, colors the humor, especially the topical bits about the commie sock-hops where men dance grimly with one another, and a screening of La Dolce Vita stirs up the town like a broadcast direct from the Planet of the Decadent instead of a movie made less than an hour’s flight away.  It also carries into the visuals:  the cinematography, mostly by future Woody Allen D.P. Carlo di Palmi, mixes a keen eye for architecture with some sharp, stark noir lighting, but it’s Germi’s eye that, even with two stars as photogenic as Mastroianni and Sandrelli, he gives plenty of space in front of the camera with various town grotesques that give it all a natural look — making the descents into jolly dark fantasy all the more effective.

There’s also some fairly subversive work bubbling under the script; it’s no Dr. Strangelove, but both visually and narratively, Germi and his team are telling us things aren’t always as they appear.  Cefalù disdains the half-literate romantic gabble that comes out of his wife, even as he pines away for Angela, who has got her to a nunnery; he presents an impeccable public spectacle, all right angles and Persols, but at home he loafs around like the bums who are beneath even the notice of the lively Reds, looking like a disheveled oaf with even less vigor than the workmen who are always clanging around his estate.

There are a few unforgettable shots; my favorite was that of Cefalù staring through shutters — the film’s recurring motif for the just out-of-reach — with a deadly boredom in his eyes and acrid fumes from soapmaking in the courtyard swirling around.  It shocks, coming just before his first gruesome murder fantasy, and could have come out of one of the better American crime dramas of the late ’50s or early ’60s.  (The ones that follow are increasingly ridiculous, and include blasting her off into space on a Russian rocket as she cackles gleefully.)  The plot takes equally strange turns, both towards the broad and the narrow:  Cefalù’s murder plot is an overly complicated wheeze, but Angela’s father is a brute straight out of early Fellini, and Cefalù’s trial, where his attorney argues that his old man didn’t love him enough, plops right down in the middle of farce and tense realism.

Taking it in at such a far remove from its history, Divorce seems like a genre mash-up before its time, something the Coen Brothers might have done if you tossed them back half a century and replaced their arch formalism with more of the middle-class realism that sometimes burbles through in a movie like A Serious Man.  Neither fish nor fowl but with a fine supply of flesh and some good red herring, it doesn’t entirely work as the culmination of a tour through neorealism into crime drama, nor is it completely successful as as a wide-ranging comedy.  But as an ambitious amalgam of the two, it’s a bit ahead of its time, which is both a compliment and a criticism.  Though more cunningly competent than transcendent, it’s absolutely worth seeing, and seems at its best to point forward to a new development in Italian cinema that never quite arrived.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Thanks to recent “data”, I am sad to report that it is no longer permitted to talk about the following topics until all the other problems in the world have been completely solved, beginning with global poverty and ending with the fact that there is nowhere near my apartment to get Slurpees.  I understand that this will be a difficult adjustment for many of you, and I sympathize, but “data”.  Here is the list of embargoed discussions:

- Any complaints about the War on Christmas.  This is not a thing.  I promise, you can celebrate Christmas in any way you choose up to and including drinking three bottles of Old Overholt and puking yourself to death all over the local crèche.  No one is taking your Christmas away.  You can talk about Jesus until His surely imminent return and the law will do nothing to stop you.  The cashier at Wal-Mart saying “happy holidays” is not a form of oppression.

- Similarly, no more talk about the Obama Administration taking your guns away.  It’s just not going to happen. As long as you keep shoveling money at the NRA, and you will because you are an easily manipulated dunce, not even the tiniest little baby steps will be taken toward the slightest bit of firearms regulation.  All you are doing by stockpiling ammo is helping put the children of Winchester executives through college.  The government — or a Republican one, anyway — is more likely to take your Medicare and Social Security away than it is your guns.  Just…just calm down.

- Complaints about being asked to press 1 for English.  In fact, complaining about anything that “inconveniences” you for less than five seconds is forbidden from this point forward.

- Hand-wringing over the fact that there are now more ‘minority’ babies than there are white onesˆ.  Look, honkies:  the only reason you would need to worry about this is if you have consistently treated non-whites like shit for all of recorded history.  And you haven’t done that, have you?  You have?  Oh.  Well, in that case, there are two options for you:  either stop reading this and get fucking so you can shore up the stockpile of Cadens, Makaylahs, Brysons, and Dakotas; or start treating the dark-skinned kids decently so they won’t want to put you up against a wall once they’re old enough to start buying the guns Obama didn’t get around to outlawing.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which will be easier.

- How Muslims are taking over the country and will soon impose their evil Sharia law on us.  This isn’t even remotely happening in Europe, where there are a lot more Muslims than there are here.  Muslims, on the other hand, would be pretty justified in worrying that Americans are going to take over their country and impose their laws and standards, but let that one drift.

- The disgraceful manner in which everyone but you chooses to raise their children

- Decrying the death of pop music.  Look, I understand.  You’re old now.  It took me by surprise, too, and there was nothing pleasant about it.  But let’s not pretend that there’s been a cultural apocalypse that just happened to coincide with the appearance of your first gray hair.

-  The defense of worthless garbage on the basis that you “don’t want to have to think about things” or that “you just want to turn your brain off for a while”.  First of all, if there is one problem America most certainly does not suffer from, it is thinking too much about anything.  Second, what do you do that your brain is so fucking taxed?  Rough day down at the copy-editing factory?  Lose a thumb entering numbers into that Access database, did we?  The whole idea of the necessity of escapism is sheer bafflegab; as my friend Tom Block put it, “an escape from what?  We live in Disneyland, for crying out loud.”  If exercising your brain is causing you that much fucking grief, stick an ice pick in your earhole and be done with it.

-  Saying that anything, especially the pointing out of obvious racism, is the new racism.  No.  It is not.  Racism is the old racism, and is also the new racism, on account of its being racist.

-  Defending the shitty behavior of anyone, but especially famous people, government officials, or huge corporations, by pointing out that “they didn’t do anything illegal”.  When did we become a nation of unpaid trial lawyers?  Unless someone’s paying me at least three figures an hour to do so, I’m not particularly interested in acting as a loophole detector for some million-dollar cretin.  And for a country that is relentlessly and drearily moralistic about just about everything else, we seem to delight in doing free PR when it comes to letting rich people off the hook.  It may come as a shock, but people like this literally make the laws, so explaining in a patronizing tone that some egregious misdeed that would shame anyone’s grandmother wasn’t technically against the law isn’t the dust-off-your-hands-and-walk-away defense that people seem to think it is.

That’s it for now.  Carry on.  Data!

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.  (Elie Wiesel)

I’m not especially familiar with the work of Scott Kurtz.  Cursory investigation reveals that his webcomic, PvP, is quite successful, though, which may explain why his recent post regarding creator’s rights and the Avengers movie shows such a staggering lack of empathy and an inability to understand why anyone might seek redress for an injustice.  This is America, after all, land of Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, where everyone assumes that success is a birthright and that any protest against the powerful is nothing more than the hurling of a bunch of sour grapes.  What is harder to understand is why Kurtz wraps his argument in robes of nobility and altruism, as if he is doing quite a wonderful thing by exhorting his readers to abandon the very notion of pointing out injustice.  Every self-flattering moralist likes to dress himself up in a mantle of optimism and faith in the goodness of mankind, but Kurtz’s bewildering deployment of the concept of cynicism suggest that his biggest problem is not one of belief, but of simple comprehension.

Kurtz gets entangled in definitions right away, when he characterizes as “slacktivism” the notion that it would be a good thing for anyone who enjoys Avengers to donate the cost of a ticket to the Hero Initiative.  ”Slacktivism”, as it is commonly understood, is the process of mounting a protest or sponsoring a social cause by doing something that costs nothing in terms of money or time, such as retweeting a feel-good statement or tinting your Facebook icon a meaningful color.  Donating money to an organized charity, conversely, is just plain old activism, since it requires both action and expense.  Perhaps Kurtz is angry at the Hero Initiative plan (started, by the way, by my good friend Calamity Jon Morris; you can read more about it here) because, benefitting as it does hundreds of comics creators in financial need, it blows a hole in his already-flaccid argument that this is all about Jack Kirby, who at any rate is too dead to enjoy it.

Kurtz really tries to push the unmade-by-anyone point that this is just about Jack Kirby getting credit for creating the Avengers, when it is, of course, about the fact that artists and writers for all Marvel books are routinely cheated out of money, credit and a decent degree of compensation for the success of the characters they helped shape.  He does this, oddly enough, by displaying panels from the original Lee-Kirby Avengers and the Millar-Hitch Ultimates and asking the reader which more resembles the version of the team they saw on screen.  This doesn’t make the profound point he seems to think it does; indeed, it’s hard to tell what point it’s intended to make at all.  Baz Luhrmann stranding Romeo Montague in South Beach and equipping him with a silver-plated handgun does not stop the play from having been written by William Shakespeare; and, more to the point, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch no more own those characters than Jack Kirby did, and will receive no more compensation from the film’s gargantuan profits than I will.  (They may, indeed, someday find themselves in financial need, and will no doubt be met with sneers from Kurtz telling them they’ve got nothing coming.)

It only gets worse from here:  once again mischaracterizing the argument of the compassionate defenders of creator’s rights that so infuriate him, Kurtz notes all the other people — Walt Simonson, Bob Layton, Jim Steranko — who helped define the characters we think of as Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury.  This is fine so far as it goes, but no one is arguing that Kirby and Kirby alone be compensated for his work on the characters.  Those of us who are repulsed by Marvel’s treatment of its writers and artists would be just as happy to see Simonson, Layton, and Steranko get a bigger slice of the pie as well, something that is in no way incompatible with the simple factual admission that the characters were originally created by Jack Kirby.  His examples are somewhat bewildering on their face, as well; Steranko frequently feuded with Marvel, Simonson is a board member of the Hero Initiative, and Bob Layton has recently struggled in the indie comics field that Kurtz cites as evidence that creator’s rights is no longer an issue.  All three are outspoken defenders of creator’s rights.

The attempt that follows to argue that creator’s rights issues are no longer worth our attention is beneath mention.  Especially coming from a successful webcomics producer — one of the few — it smacks of successful women who spurn feminism, or bourgeoisie blacks who argue that racism is dead.  The I-got-mine argument is essentially irrational and selfish, and ignores the greater shape of the industry in which everyone must work. Citing things like Kickstarter and the B&W comics movement of the 1980s is arguing that a minuscule portion of the overall business excuses the egregious abuses of the two companies that dominate the industry, and doesn’t even address the central issue, which is that Marvel’s creators still do not own their creations.  Pretending that things are much better now is quite daring in light of recent developments; the case of Alan Moore and the “Before Watchmen” books alone should argue that the multi-million-dollar corporations that control the vast majority of paying comics work are in no way ready to give up one inch of their control of the material that fattens their bottom line to the people who make it.

Now that he’s really wound up, Kurtz ends his nonsensical tirade by really going for the gusto:  ”It’s not as simple as ‘Give Jack’s estate some money, Marvel. You can afford it.’ That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.”  Actually, it is as simple as that — that is the very definition of pragmatic.  Take a small amount of money you don’t need to correct an injustice that was all your fault; you score a huge public relations coup that will buy you enough goodwill to weather the next 20 years of screwing your employees, while still coming out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead. It’s as practical as can be.

As far as the line about cynicism, I’m frankly flabbergasted.  Supporters of the Hero Initiative and creator’s rights advocates are attempting to get comics fans to donate money to the creators of the books they love, to compensate for how they they were routinely underpaid, overworked, and cheated out of the financial gain their bosses got from their hard work.  Kurtz, meanwhile, is arguing that it doesn’t matter who got screwed, because things are better now probably, and besides who cares, the Avengers movie was awesome, so everybody shut up about who screwed who.  And we’re the ones being cynical?  What we’re asking for has nothing to do with cynicism. It has everything to do with justice, or at the very least decency, which are the opposite of cynicism.  Cynicism is saying what Kurtz says: this has always happened, it will always happen, we can’t do anything about it anyway, let’s all shut up and pretend it’s fixed and move on. That is precisely cynicism.

Having thoroughly ensured that the boots of people he doesn’t even work for are well and truly spittled, Kurtz ends his flailing around by telling us who the real villains are:  internet commenters.  (As Calamity Jon pointed out, this is a man who calls it childish to define the Marvel vs. Kirby feud in terms of good guys and bad guys, but he ends his essay by comparing people who disagree with him to a comic book supervillain.)  People who want Kirby and other creators to get what’s due them aren’t decent people looking for justice; they’re “worms” trying to “make themselves feel powerful”.  (Never mind that virtually all the power in this scenario is held by wealthy corporate executives, as it pretty much always is.)  The real bad guys aren’t big business shot-callers or billion-dollar movie studios, it’s internet cowards “getting in a good dig” because they never had the courage to create anything themselves.  (Never mind that hundreds of the people supporting Kirby and the creator’s rights movement in general are themselves comic creators, making the quite rational decision that if they don’t stand up for creator’s rights for others, no one will bother to stand up for them.)  Scott Kurtz bases his whole argument on the idea that he is trying to break free from a hurtful cynicism; but there is nothing fresh, new and optimistic about defending the bosses when they try to step on their workers for the millionth time.  He may think he’s letting sunshine into the room by telling us all to stop living in the past and just take what we’re given, but the real cynics — the big shots his argument will ultimately benefit — have heard this song before; because they’re the ones who wrote it.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

If you credit the arguments of those on the comfortable center of the divide between rich and poor, we are currently locked in a life-or-death struggle between radical Republicans and a thin blue line of heroic Democrats who alone champion the liberal values of civilization against the rapacious hordes of Eastasia.  When you’re south of the line, however, things look a bit more bleak, as the push and pull of one party against another begins to resemble increasingly a tug-of-war between Rich and Richer.  While it can’t be denied that the G.O.P gets worse every year, and would only accelerate the damage they’ve done to the country if they were voted back in, the failure of the Democrats to stake out a truly oppositional position, especially in matters of economics, makes centrist cries of how much worse things would be under a Republican administration sound increasingly like Snowball asking the animals if they wanted Farmer Jones back.

In the past, Americans have known what to do when faced with a seemingly unanswerable choice between two suspiciously similar positions.  It’s what got us our own country, the will to end slavery, the original Republican party, labor unions, civil rights, feminism, and a Constitution.  Now, the only ones agitating for a change from the amicable buck-passing from public to private are the Occupy protestors, and they are made the subject of endless but-what-do-you-want questioning, as if the answer was not written on placards ten feet high.  The liberals who ought to be their allies meet with an embarrassed shrug the unleashing of brutal police action against them, and no one much cares that weapons and techniques created by Republicans to be used against terrorist murderers are now employed by Democrats against people asking for a living wage.  Even Democrats who can muster a bit of sympathy usually end up wondering aloud how the Occupiers might translate their desires into legislation, which is to say, how they might submit the very nature of their protest to the system they are protesting against, and see it transformed into a toothless, squalling nothing.  One might as well have asked George Washington why he didn’t ask the House of Lords to vote on whether America might be allowed to self-govern, or ask Martin Luther King why he didn’t leave it up to white people to grant Negroes their rights when they got around to it.

It is very difficult to make the comfortable see why the uncomfortable are so upset that the choice between A and B has been reduced to a choice between A and A-.  When the government seems to be addressing your interests, it is hard to put yourself in the position of a person whose interests are not being addressed, even if such persons constitute the vast majority of the population.  Even as new reports surface that poverty — even poverty as defined by the entirely inadequate standards devised by our government — is on the increase in over half the country; even as unemployment remains at its worst since the Great Depression; even as private wealth reaches an obscene high water mark and public aid is at an all-time low, we are met with agreement on both sides of the so-called Great Divide that what is needed is less taxation for the rich, more austerity for the poor, a safety net for banks and big business but a reduction of Medicare and Social Security.  Both sides say yes to corporate welfare and no to public assistance; both sides think unions are a relic of the industrial past; both sides agree that corporations have every right to take jobs to other countries and bring the profits back home; neither side finds it odd to allow banks to pay their executives whatever they like but strip their employees of their pensions.  We are in a new Gilded Age, but the Wobblies have been replaced by the Know-Nothings, “workers unite” has given way to “I got mine”, and the robber barons still call the government the enemy, but now they line up to take a cut of the enemy’s fat.

That our political system is bought and paid for by the wealthiest of private interests seems so obvious at this point that it hardly even seems worth exploring.  For all that we like to crow that only in America could Barack Obama be president, the fact is other countries routinely elect members of their working classes, while our government is essentially indistinguishable from that of the board of directors of a billion-dollar corporation.  The net worth of an average congressman is over $900,000, ten times that of the average American citizen; over half of them are millionaires, a level of wealth unimaginable for tens of millions of their so-called constituency.  Some fifty million Americans have no health care of any kind; all of their elected representatives have health care, which the people who elect them pay for.  Almost none of them have faced the kind of economic difficulties their constituents serve on a daily basis; and yet they routinely suggest as solutions for such problems legislation that relies on shaming, humiliating and blaming the people they are charged to help for having had any problems in the first place.  It is not hard to arrive at the conclusion that many of them are hostile to the very idea of government helping anyone other than themselves and their wealthy clientele; even the least politically engaged person can weigh his single vote against the $4 billion dollars spent on lobbying every year and come to the conclusion that he’d be better off staying home on Election Day.

And yet, when the difference between the parties on not only economic issues but concerns over privacy, government intrusion in private life, drug policy, police powers, and military adventurism are narrower than ever, when money is more of a corrupting influence on politics than ever, when it is a de facto agreement between both parties that privatization is always the best option, when no one seriously disputes the idea that for-profit industries are better than government at nearly everything, when the gap between rich and poor more than ever trends towards third-world numbers, it is now that we are exhorted the most to stay the course.  It is now that the danger of Farmer Brown’s return is the most imminent, it is now that the Eastasian hordes are at their most ravenous, it is now that we must most flagrantly ignore the similarities between the economic policies of the two parties.  This show trial nonsense seemed to hit its peak when centrist liberals gathered en masse to denounce the fifth column for voting Nader, which was the proximate cause of Bush’s victory and not that he and his cronies in the Supreme Court stole the election.  Backsliding scum who dared seek a third way were to blame, just as they are to blame now for Obama turning out to be the moderate centrist technocrat he’s always been.

That’s the most galling aspect of the game at this point:  just as we base our economy on the manufacturing of endless amusing gadgets and then blame poor people for buying them, we elect leaders with no special interest in the needs of the working class and then blame the working class for not voting for them.  The Emanual Goldstein in this scenario is named “pragmatism”, for surely Comrade Obama would shower a largesse of government benefits on the struggling poor if it were only practical to do so.  But it is not, we are assured, because of matters of compromise and triangulation and the results of deliberately pre-cooked polls and the gathering of imaginary political clout and all the other things that don’t seem to matter when the other guys are in charge.  A Republican in office can summon disaster with the flick of a finger; a Democrat in office wants to do good but is surrounded by swirling phantoms of practicality that prevent him from moving an inch in any direction but the way the tide is flowing.  When the G.O.P. is in power, the President is an evil wizard who crafts his every malignant thought into reality with just a twitch of the nose; when the centrists’ man is in power, the President is little more than a figurehead who we must vote for to make him feel better, even though the real power now apparently lies with the House Minority Whip or someone.  (Should you think that, freed from the messy compromises required for good government, centrist millionaires suddenly become leftist agitators, look no further than the life of Bill “NAFTA” Clinton.  Taking a break from his hugely lucrative speaking gigs in front of big corporations and special interest groups, he appeared at a “Fiscal Summit” where he nodded solemnly at John Boehner’s calls for austerity, blamed his own party for clinging to ‘entitlements’, and endorsed the ridiculous Bowles/Simpson plan.  If you don’t think this is a glimpse into Barack Obama’s future, you’re fooling yourself.)

Ask why, if a Democratic president is going to leave you just as wanting as a Republican, you should vote for either, and you’re a quitter.  Agitate for a third party and you’re a dreamer.  Point out the obvious and you’re a cynic; take your dissatisfaction to the streets and you’re a thug; give voice to your misery and you’re just bitter.  Demand something better and you’re lectured that the perfect is the enemy of the good, as if you’ve asked for Utopia instead of a president who thinks the needs of the elderly poor are a slightly higher priority for the government than protecting billionaire financiers from the consequences of their own behavior.  Insist on reform and you are told it’s better to work within the system we have than to try and change it, as if any aspect of government were not created by people and cannot be changed by people, as if this country were not invented out of whole cloth.  Point out the courage and effectiveness of progressive Democrats of the past, and you will be told that they were exceptional people who had the good fortune of exceptional circumstances, as if we were no longer capable of being exceptional, as if there are not events transpiring all over the world that make these exceptional times.

Every progressive force, every revolutionary party, every labor union and every civil rights organization has faced two kinds of opposition.  The first comes from outside:  the obvious enemy, the reactionary, the royalist, the capitalist, the racist, the ones who you know oppose the very idea of what you’re trying to do, who openly say that they want you to stay poor, stay occupies, stay exploited and enslaved.  They are great in number but they can be beaten, and they do not bother to conceal their contempt for you.  The far greater threat comes from inside:  the one who preaches to the heavens that he’s on your side, but forever urges caution, trepidation, and calm.  These are the ones who want smoke without fire, thunder without lightning, words without action; these are the ones who vote for leaders who will stay the course and mouth platitudes, which are free, and not cry out for movement, which is costly.  These are the ones who see how Iceland rejected a technocratic solution that put the government right back in the hands of bankers, and decided it was too small a story to report; these are the ones who see how Greece is tired of austerity for the poor and splendor for the rich, and accuse them of extremist agitation against the banker’s paradise that is the Eurozone.  These are the ones who consider every prior victory a fluke until it’s historically convenient to claim credit for it.  These are the ones whose slogan is “not yet”, whose watchword is “later”; the ones for whom the time is never right to do what is right.  We never won a thing with their help, brothers and sisters, because they take care of their own.  It’s time for us to do the same.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?  No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth.  The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form, and the medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has had its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and had its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

The bosses of our mass media — press, radio, film and television — have their aim of taking our minds off disaster.  Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster. (Ernst Fischer)

Just a quick one tonight, inspired by Sony Pictures’ firing of Dan Harmon.  Whatever you think of Community, Harmon was one of the few show-runners in television with such obvious concern and care for the quality of the product he put together; if this made him hard to get along with for the moneymen, then I guess I’d rather have an asshole who agonized over getting every decision right than a hack who’s happy just to collect a paycheck.  Sony’s decision, and let’s not pretend otherwise, was about making more and easier money for Sony, and the way they chose to go about removing him from the show he made is just another example, if any more were needed, of the way the businessmen who control art will go to great lengths to remind creators that they are the least important figures in the creative process.

Harmon will be staying on as a “consulting producer”, which means that Sony can’t legally be fully shed of him and they’re handing him a paycheck to stay far away from whatever episodes remain to be produced.  Apologists will put on their REALIST hats and talk about inevitability and impracticality the way they always do when it’s time for the bosses to hand out another beating, but I won’t be watching the show anymore.  As far as I’m concerned, it had its very satisfying series finale last night — something it’s now increasingly clear Harmon could see coming.  (If you have any doubts about Sony’s intentions, all you need to know is that not only is Harmon out, but so are at least two of his writers and three of his producers, including the Russo Brothers.)  People will shrug and scoff and remind you that this happens all the time, but that’s what it always is:  an excuse for swallowing the shit they serve you.

This is a situation with more than a few parallels to what’s currently going with Marvel’s huge success with the Avengers movie and their refusal to share the nearly incalculable profits with anyone who helped create the franchise, and DC’s decision to move ahead with a series of pre-Watchmen comics after having screwed Alan Moore out of his rights to the material he created.  So I’ll leave you with a chat I had with my friend Calamity Jon Morris earlier today; hopefully he won’t mind me sharing it.  (And if you’d like to actually do something about the ongoing hammering these billion-dollar corporations are dealing to creators, why not do as Jon suggests here, and match the money you spend on seeing Avengers with a donation to the Hero Initiative?)

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. (Joseph Brodsky)

Of what value is boredom in criticism?  Noel Murray wrote recently that it was one of his most hated critical terms, though I think this is more a function of the critic than the creation.  Being bored can mean that a work of art has failed to engage you on an aesthetic level, but it can also mean that you have a short attention span, or that you become easily frustrated with something confusing, unexpected, or unusually paced.  This is particularly true in the age of the blockbuster, when audiences and critics alike start to doze if something or someone is not blown up or penetrated every ten minutes.

Still, as the abolitionist Wendell Phillips observed, boredom is itself a form of criticism, and if your overwhelming response to a work of art is to be bored, the artist must answer for that.  Boredom is certainly the default reaction of most viewers to Chantal Akerman’s provocative, brilliant 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, so it’s necessary to dig a little deeper and ask:  what does our boredom mean?  At nearly three and a half punishing hours, the story of a single mother’s prison-like routine of housework, tending to her dullard of a son, and occasional work as a prostitute* to keep afloat is intended  to bore us.  Akerman’s motionless camera, recording without flourish the everyday banality of a struggling working-class woman, uses boredom like a truncheon, pounding us into empathy and defying our expectations at every turn.  She means to make us understand what life is like for millions of women just like Jeanne Dielman, and would trap us in this role of exhausted observer forever if she could.

What is shocking, then, is how Jeanne Dielman bores without alienating.  It is a film that bores, but is not boring; though many would find it intolerably tedious, I find it far more compelling than big-money wastes of time that pop constantly on the screen but go nowhere.  The film’s virtues are many:  structurally, it’s absolutely masterful, and for a narrative in which almost nothing happens, every scene is worth paying attention to.  Akerman’s visual constructions take the banal and make them breathtaking; the composition of many of its static shots are the equal of anything one might expect in a Peter Greenaway film.  Credit is due, too, to cinematographer Babette Mangolt and editor Patricia Canino; their work takes Akerman’s structural planning and turns it into the art of the commonplace, transforming low-bourgeois bedrooms and kitchens, welfare offices and cobbler’s shops into slowly moving tapestries of struggle.

Jeanne Dielman, too, might be the most Situationist film ever made, and coming at the moment in time it did, could be seen as the culmination of that movement’s visual argument.  Far more than the didactic aggression of Godard’s political films, or the near-mystical abstraction of the short films of SI godhead Guy Debord himself, Akerman’s masterpiece hones in with merciless exactitude on that most important of qualities, the critique of everyday life.  She forces your attention without quarter on the samey routine of her protagonist, literally never letting us look away.  The restrictions and tiny oppressions of poverty are taken as simple reality, not made into an operatic setpiece; and the stakes are shown to be grotesquely high in the most ordinary and gradual manner imaginable.

And here is where Jeanne Dielman transcends boredom, which it uses to command the viewer’s focus the way a robber might use a knife to the throat, and becomes something magnificent, something that justifies with finality the much-marginalized use of realism in cinema.  I won’t attempt a long discourse on the uses of realism; my friend Tom Block does a pretty definitive job of it here.  There is something to be said about the nature of escapism, which I may get around to one of these days, but for Jeanne there is no escape.  What is so overwhelming about the narrative is not that Jeanne’s disintegration is played as spectacle, the shocking act of a woman gone mad, but as inevitable, the predictable result of a thousand tiny humiliations and defeats.

Akerman shows us — no, makes us see – the power of the seemingly meaningless to destroy those without power. With the eye of someone who has lived it, she shows how the utterly ordinary concatenation of frustrations — dropping a spoon, running out of potatoes, breaking a shoe — can pile up to the point where they seem completely intolerable.  Little frayed ends that would occupy center stage in most ‘psychological dramas’ are here made part of the background, becoming an omnipresent factor that is barely noticed but that spells unavoidable destruction.  Jeanne’s slow decay is not rendered in moments of hysterical drama or arch obviousness, and Delphine Seyrig plays her as the complete philosophical opposite of her character in Last Year at Mareinbad.  Instead, her breakdown is a mechanical one, like a machine tasked to do the same repetitive job one too many times.  She reads a concerned letter from her sister in the voice of a ghost, and the electric flickers on her wall pass her notice, even though they are warnings of imminent catastrophe.  And when the final violent break comes, it’s not inspired by some horrible abuse or degradation — it’s brought on by a minor loss of control, which, to people who control almost nothing about their lives, can be the worst thing of all.

Akerman has always stood out slightly from her peers in European cinema:  Belgian, not French; working-class, not a product of the universities; female, not male; gay, not straight (and yet powerfully resistant to the idea of being categorized and showcased as a ‘gay filmmaker’); Jewish, not Gentile; structural, not formal; and lethally literal where others can be maddeningly metaphorical.  This shows in all of her best work (It’s nearly impossible to track down, but I cannot recommend enough her hypnotic travelogue D’Est), and the slight whiff of disrepute it gave her allowed her that extra few feet of freedom to make a movie as daring as Jeanne Dielman.  Watch it, and you will be bored, but you will hopefully gain the sense of boredom being used on you as a tool, an effect, a weapon, of witnessing realism as a trial by fire and boredom as a craft wielded as skillfully as Hitchcock used suspense.  It is the everyday as art where the game seems numbingly slow, but the stakes are terrifyingly high.

*:  Another exceptional quality of Jeanne Dielman is how, through its rigor and determination, it short-circuits the judgment that is the natural Western reaction to any suggestion of unconventional female sexuality by making it so matter-of-fact that it is almost invisible.  Until it is necessary for Akerman to bring it to the fore, she sublimates it into the ordinary so that it becomes no more worthy of comment than her washing the dishes.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping.  It does not matter whether his work is needed or not; he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least.  This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob.  The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.  A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

“We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.  But don’t expect us to do anything about it.  We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition.  We feel that you are much safer as you are.  The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day.  So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.”

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays.  Very few cultivated people have less than, say, four hundred pounds a year; and naturally they side with the rich because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty.  Foreseeing some dismal Marxian utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.  Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.  It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.  It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, but in reality there is no such difference.  The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy-dandy:  which is the justice and which is the thief?

Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.  But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor.  For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?  In my copy of Villon’s poems, the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “ne pain ne voient qu’aux fenetres” by a footnote, so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally.  The educated man pictures a horde of sub-men, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.  ”Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice sooner than let that mob loose.”   He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose.  The mob is loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Dear Mr. Roseman,

First, I believe introductions are in order.  My name is Eliza Torrance, and I’ll be taking over the editorial position here at Ramsette-Hill vacated by Art Hough, who is retiring after 35 years in the position.  I believe he is moving to Costa Rica, or El Salvador, or one of those Spanish countries with two names.  Anyway, this means — or at least I hope it means — that we will have the opportunity to work together in the near future!

To address the questions on your letter of the 5th:  our reticence to sign you to a publishing contract at Ramsette-Hill has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your work.  In all frankness, Mr. Roseman, we believe that you are one of the most talented writers we have encountered in the last twenty years.  The fact that you are able to to write with such skill and insight in so many genres makes your work all the more impressive; of the fifteen manuscripts you have sent us, which range from novels to poetry to histories to textbooks, we believe all of them are of substantial quality, and at least half-a-dozen of them have the potential to become best sellers.  We so look forward to receiving new submissions from you that we are willing to indulge your curious habit of composing all your work in Ami Pro; luckily, we found a 1993 tabletop PC in the basement and had an intern do the necessary conversion.

I’m sure you know where you’re going with this, though, Mr. Roseman.  While we respect the authorial tendency to resist making changes to their work — and even believe that they may have an editorial perspective that may turn out to be the right decision in the long run — it is your refusal to allow us to publish your books under anything but the original titles you gave them that is causing the delay in what we believe would otherwise be a financially and artistically rewarding relationship between you and Ramsette-Hall.

Let us take, for example, your first novel.  It’s, in all honesty, a remarkable debut effort — accessible but artistically sophisticated, full of perceptive analysis of the human condition channeled through a handful of simply unforgettable characters.  That’s why we believed then and believe now that Hot Wet Turd Party is a title that might very well prevent it from getting the critical and popular attention it deserves.  Likewise, Blood of Acadia:  A New History of King William’s War, 1688-1697 is an amazing piece of work — moving, thorough, and shining a brilliant new light on its subject.  Unfortunately, it is not in fact a history of King William’s War, but a biography of Bram Stoker.  While it is clear to me from reviewing the 231 pages of correspondence between you and Art Hough that you don’t believe this to be a problem, our marketing department begs to differ.

Your book of spiritual poetry, I confess as a devout Christian, I found extremely moving, and it encouraged me to learn new things about other faiths while manifestly reaffirming my own devotion to the Lord.  I make this personal admission so as to drive home how strong is my belief that If I Eat a Chinaman, Will I Be Hungry An Hour Later? And Other Kooky Cannibal Queries is an absolutely inappropriate title for this, or any other, book.  And while I don’t have much of a grasp of physics, our science editor assures me that your entry-level college text on the subject is illuminating and education, but written in a style that will appeal to even the most casual student, and stands a very good chance of becoming the definitive assigned reading in schools all over the country — all the more astonishing an achievement for someone with no formal scientific training.  And to think that the one thing standing in the way of such a remarkable outcome is your adamant insistence on retaining the original title, a string of over 300 Cyrillic letters that our in-house translators assure me is complete gibberish.

Mr. Roseman, please believe that we honor your artistic integrity, just as much as we value your work and hope to be able to release it to a public that will value it just as much.  But, as I’m sure you heard from at least a few of the three dozen houses you say turned you down before you came to us, publishing is a business.  Wouldn’t it be worth just this one little compromise in order to open up your entire career as a writer?  It’s a small thing, the title of a book, and what good will it do, in the long run, to cling to one as frankly unappealing as Hog-Fucking Saturdays and Other Reminiscences of Growin’ Up Arkansas, balanced against all the good it would do if you released it under a name more a suited for a book on diabetic nutritional health?  Please consider what I’ve said.  In the meantime, I look forward to your new collection of children’s cartoons — remind me again, is it Burning Triangle:  A Statistical Analysis of the Holocaust, or Peachflesh, a Novel of Hebephilia?

yours in hope,

Eliza Torrance

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not often thought of as a useful text for illumination of the art of criticism, but like all great writers, Orwell contained multitudes of meaning in his writing, leaving great lessons barely concealed for application to whatever subject needed them.  At the book’s very beginning, Winston Smith opens his newly acquired diary, and can’t quite begin to write.  For a moment, he cannot even recall why he did something so potentially damning.  But then it makes sense:  he begins to write, and does not stop until his hands start to cramp, because he must do something, anything, to displace the endlessly streaming monologue that has been running through his head for years.  This is what is worth death to him:  the transference of thought to page.

Looking back on all the words I’ve written the last few years, I fear that I’ve come across as impossible to please, forever sounding the death knell of contemporary criticism.  If that’s true, then I’ve made my case very badly (a distinct possibility to be sure).  It is only because the rise of the Internet created so many astounding possibilities for the art of criticism that I have become so disappointed with the sad deflation of that art in the last decade or so; it is only because I find criticism such a vital and necessary activity that I demand so much from it.  Art may be a mirror in which we see ourselves and our world, but criticism is the window that lets in the light, without which the images in the mirror may not be seen.

It’s temptingly easy to blame commercialism for the decay of criticism, but it’s also increasingly inaccurate.  While it’s true that approaching criticism as only a job (not simply as a job, because much great work has been done by critics for pay) reduces it to the level of any other work-for-hire and drains it of the need for a unique perspective.  But if anything, the Internet has been the executioner of commercial criticism.  It has helped demolish print media, and made the job of a staff critic the equivalent of a typewriter repairman; it has replaced the possession of critical insight with aggregations and mathematical models, as if numbers and data fields could tell you anything useful about a work of art; and worst of all, it has given people the idea that having an opinion about something is the same thing as delivering a critical analysis of it.

Even this is too short-sighted and limited, though; the field of criticism, at least outside of academia — where it still thrives, but makes no effort at involving anyone but the elite in the process of becoming involved in their own culture — has been narrowing for decades.  And it’s hard to shake the sensation that this is because we have raised up a generation of critics who don’t believe that they are anything but mere functionaries instead of people actively engaged with art.  They flit into our field of vision, deliver a vague and impressionistic encapsulation of a cultural product not markedly different than what we might get out of a publicist’s press release, and then retreat, pathologically afraid of inserting anything into their work that might resemble a theory or a worldview.

While we expect, and even demand, passion and perspective from our artists, we hold them at arm’s length when our critics feature too much of them — or even openly revile them.  We have made a fundamental and nearly fatal mistake by thinking we have to agree with a critic to count them as worthwhile, when, in fact, very nearly the opposite is true:  we learn virtually nothing from critics we always agree with, while those who provoke us and prod us into an unfamiliar reaction to the familiar, or immerse us completely into the unfamiliar, are the most valuable.  Jonathan Rosenbaum’s ideological inflexibility and resistance to commercial art can be immensely frustrating, but hardly a more brilliant and expressive film critic is alive in this country.  Greil Marcus’ tendency to go off on dreamlike tangents, forsaking the subject at hand for how it can lead him to observations about the culture at large, strikes many as irrelevant and pretentious, but you will learn more from him than you will from a million straightforward essays by lesser critics.  I disagree substantially with virtually everything Harold Bloom has ever had to say about literature; but forcing myself to articulate the nature and substance of those disagreements has taught me more about books than any other critic could accomplish.

What do all of these people, and more like them (for the world of criticism may be in decay, but above it soar dozens of engaging writers, hard to see through the thickening gloom), have in common?  Like great artists, they believe in something.  They expect art to be a certain way, they demand a particular perspective, and if they don’t get it, they say so.  They have a worldview.  What is Peter Travers’ worldview?  What is Harry Knowles’, Michiko Kakutani’s, Sasha Frere-Jones’?  I fear I could read a million reviews by some of our leading critics of music, film, and literature (to say nothing of television, which, with a tiny few exceptions, has generated enormous quantities of critics in the last ten years, but no qualities) and never find out what, exactly, they are looking for in art, or why, beyond the pitiably low hurdle of mere competence.

They also know — and here is where we can blame the Internet, with its insatiable demand for content and its replacement of the deep read with the click-through — that there is a substantial body of work in every artform that is simply not worth paying attention to.  They are conspicuous for what they ignore as well as what they embrace.  Many younger writers feel that they have to have an opinion about everything; equally afeared of being accused of inconsistency, surely the most ridiculous way to attack a critic but depressingly common, they fail to revisit and reread.  They hold their first opinions on a subject as inviolate, ignore what they’ve always ignored, and worst of all, think the worst thing in the world is to be wrong.  Faulkner once wrote that the most cowardly and base of all things for a writer is to be afraid; if I could by fiat drop one idea into the minds of critics, it would be that it’s perfectly fine to be wrong.  Until you conquer the fear of being wrong, you will never hold an opinion worth hearing.

Possessing no especial perspective and afraid to admit the obvious truth that our critical perspectives change by the day as we are exposed to more and more of the culture, contemporary critics engage in what are essentially mathematical games:  playing connect-the-dots from one influence to another, an amusing activity that nonetheless resembles keeping score in a baseball game more than it does assembling a genuine critical perspective; substituting personal anecdotes, funny stories, and cultural reminiscences for genuine ideas, theories and observations; and, worst of all, the creation of endless ratings, rankings, and hierarchies.  This is a poison as addictive as sugar, and it can teach us only what a critic’s personal preferences are at a specific moment in time — which is good to know on the same level as knowing your blood type or what kind of food you’re in the mood for, but can reveal absolutely nothing about art or what it means.  It is exactly why Manny Farber, a great artist in the way that criticism can be an art, felt that evaluation was generally worthless, and that whether or not a critic liked something was of only marginal relevance.  He spoke of such hierarchies and orderings as “the derelict appendages of criticism”.

And so we bog down into critical work that would be laughably absurd if only we could see them for what they are:  reviews of film and television that make no reference to how they look, reviews of literature that make no reference to the quality of the prose, reviews of music that make only the most perfunctory attempt to tell you what it sounds like.  It is this stupefyingly misguided approach that Flann O’Brien identified over 60 years ago in critics of Joyce as “ignorance of the essential”.  Our critics single out plot, a fleeting trivium; they speak glowingly of individual performances with no reference to how they contributed to the meaning or message of a film (a good performance in an ineffectual film is barely worth even speaking about, let alone writing about); they praise special effects, which is the equivalent of eating at a restaurant and praising the waiter because the chair didn’t collapse underneath you.  Speaking of a cultural object’s meaning, or emotional or intellectual import, or departures from form or idiom, or place in a historical moment, is felt not to be absolutely essential, but marginally relevant and possibly elitist.

It is possible, especially now, to overestimate the role of the critic.  It’s particularly difficult to resist such habits if you are one.  But I am convinced of this:  we will not have great art if we do not have great artists, but we will not know great art if we do not have great critics.  We can trust our own critical opinions only if we have been exposed to an environment where they are shaped and nurtured and allowed to form, not if we have let them spring up in a vacuum of meaning and conviction.  If we do not have critics who believe in art as being this or that, we will not have artists who believe it, either, and what use is an artist who doesn’t believe in art?  If a dead ear hears, a dead hand strums the guitar.  If no one cares about the shape of the words, the writer will have no cause to shape them.  If the mind behind the eye doesn’t believe that what it’s seeing is capable of great meaning, great meaning will not be shown to it.  We will instead stumble around in our own culture, from event to event, and it won’t matter if we labor fast or slow to see it, because there’s always more labor after.  We must be like Winston Smith, who did not know what he believed but knew he must believe something, who wrote because he had to make real in the world what was constantly running through his mind.  If we do not, we will have finally reduced culture to commerce, because it will no longer be something through which we can reflect or improve or empathize, but merely a list of activities to be checked off as they are completed.  The greatest critic will not be the one who sees the most in what he is watching, but the one who sees the most overall — a practitioner of cultural Taylorism, a competitive eater of art who can consume the greatest amount in the least time.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all, in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.  Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

The evolution — the mere existence – of comic strip collections is a pretty curious phenomenon.  Comic strips are the very definition of disposable pop culture; they are and almost always have been one-shot gag delivery systems designed to be forgotten five seconds after they’re read.  The dramatic narrative strips of the action and soap-opera variety are even less worth collecting, not only because they’re badly written, but because they spend half their time recapping what happened in the last installment for lazy readers.  The very notion of collecting such things seemed pretty ridiculous until a good five decades into the art form’s existence (which is particularly unfortunate, since some of the early strips, which were often quite excellent, were never preserved).  This wasn’t so much a referendum on the validity of the art form as it was an admission that the strip form was just too ephemeral to merit the treatment.

This began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, largely through the popularity of nationally syndicated strips and the subsequent marketing possibilities, another development for which every comics artist should be eternally grateful to Sparky Schulz.  And it was Schulz who was the well-deserved subject of Fantagraphics’ now-legendary line of comprehensive strip collections; their gorgeously designed, lovingly curated collection of his Peanuts strips set the standard that everyone — themselves included — would have to match from then on.  It’s a surprisingly hard decision to go all in with these sorts of collections; their positive qualities cannot be denied, but they’re also almost prohibitively expensive, and even comics fans with the resources to pony up $30 for every volume probably started to get a little leery by the time the material from the late ’70s and ’80s started appearing.

Though a huge fan of the medium’s masters, I’ve had to refrain  from pulling the trigger time and time again due to the expense and investment of time demanded by the Fantagraphics collections, but I knew the time was coming.  The company had been promising for many years that they were only a few months away from releasing the first volume of the collected Pogo, but there were always unending delays.  The lateness of the Pogo book became something of an industry joke, one which is fairly addressed in Pogo by Walt Kelly:  The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1 – Through the Wild Blue Wonder.  Editors Kim Thompson and Carolyn Kelly (Walt’s daughter) explain that they simply didn’t want the collection to come out until it was the best it could be, and that meant preparing a huge amount of archival material, much of which had been believed lost until Carolyn unearthed it.

It’s a fair cop.  Through the Wild Blue Wonder is an absolute peach of a collection; it features the typically handsome deluxe binding we’re used to from Fantagraphics and a beautiful cover, and the non-strip material within is more than enough to justify the double-sawbuck price tag.  There’s a summary of the entire contents, describing each story arc from Pogo‘s first two years; a 30-page selection of strips from the New York Star, before it became nationally syndicated; a foreword by Jimmy Breslin with a swell punchline; an exhausting intro by Fantagraphics’ Steve Thompson documenting Kelly’s life and the strip’s history; and pages of annotations by Pogo fanzine maven R.C. Harvey.  (There’s also plentiful photos and caricatures of Kelly himself, who bore an eerie resemblance to fellow comic genius Ernie Kovacs.)

Of course, any such collection lives and dies by the quality, readability and durability of the strips inside, and there’s a good reason why I exercised such patience in waiting for Wild Blue Wonder.  With all due respect to the likes of Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, Garry Trudeau, George Herriman, and other great strip artists, Pogo has always been my favorite.  Its art — influenced hugely by Kelly’s time as an animator for Walt Disney — is simply breathtaking; the facial expressions and body language in these strips are often deceptively simple, but they offer a master class in how to communicate emotion and expression in cartooning.  Kelly’s brush lines are absolutely breathtaking, and get a well-deserved showcase in beautiful rough-sketch scans that break up the chapters.  His backgrounds are lovely and provide a perfect balance to the detail in the character illustrations (as well as serving as a painful reminder of how much comic strips have lost by their constant shrinkage on the newspaper page).  The medium is a big tent and can support all levels of craft from its artists, but Walt Kelly may have been the comics page’s greatest draftsman until the arrival of Bill Watterson. And Pogo‘s lettering is simply unparalleled; no one before or since has taken such pains, not only to make the text beautiful, but to integrate it into the very nature of the strip, using it to enhance the humor and deepen the characters.

But what puts Pogo way, way over the top in terms of sheer audacious greatness isn’t its art, great as that is.  It’s Kelly’s remarkably eclectic writing and inventive use of language that makes the strip. The greatest writers in every medium were in love with language, drinking in its possibilities and letting it flow back out of them in unexpected and clever ways, and Kelly is no exception. He threw every kind of linguistic expression into Pogo‘s gumbo pot:  poetry, ballads, popular song, newspaper jargon, technical language, advertising argot, and, of course, the perceptive yet absurd mish-mash of Southern dialects spoken by his characters.  Kelly was a Yankee through and through, and the dialect of Pogo and his pals is no more meant to be a true Southern accent than the setting of the strip is a realistic depiction of the north Georgia swamps.  But he had a tremendous ear, and he managed to whip the dialects of Cajun country, the Old Dominion, the New South, and other nooks and crannies of Confederate country into a blend that was entertaining enough on its own, but when combined with the humor of the strips, was absolutely hilarious.

The humor Kelly used was also nearly impossible to describe, but joyous to experience. He found himself too limited by the simplicity of funny-animal gag strips while working at Dell; when he started Pogo, he stuck with the format, which he loved, but expanded the approach to include political satire, character-based humor, cartoonish slapstick, elaborate linguistic puns, and most of all, a jaundiced look at human nature that can only be achieved through the means of placing it in the mouths of animals.  The material collected in Through the Wild Blue Wonder is the earliest Pogo stuff, so it features relatively little of the biting political material that would be a highlight of later strips, but there’s still at least half a dozen varieties of humor on display here.  Kelly never lost sight of his great passion for making kids laugh, so he still manages to pack in plenty of goofy slapstick that will still appeal to the young ‘uns today; but he was also trying to amuse himself, and his sense of humor was decidedly dark when it came to human nature.  These early strips feature plenty of his cynical takes on favorite targets like the justice system, the newspaper trade, the hucksterism of salesmen and advertisers, and possibly tops on his hit list, the idea that technology is improving the human race.

For these strips, he usually employed the character of Howland Owl, the half-baked pseudoscientist of the Okefenokee Swamp — who, in the first volume, is memorably charged with developing atom bomb technology.  Kelly’s characters were no deeper than the water in their native marshes, but he expertly employed them as archetypes:  the misunderstood misanthrope Porky Pine, forever unable to make himself understood (he submits his tragic life story to the local newspaper, which runs it as a comic strip), the overenthusiastic Albert Alligator and his frequent partner, the easily manipulated turtle Churchy LaFemme, and the self-aggrandizing hound dog Beauregard Bugleboy are all perfectly used in showing how people get caught up in their own enthusiasms and are apt to blame everyone but themselves for the vagaries which keep them from getting what the want.  The self-serving fraud of a priest, Deacon Mushrat, appears sparingly here, and isn’t quite the moralizing hypocrite he would become in later years; his role as villain is largely filled by snake-oil salesman Seminole Sam.  But the essential set-ups are all here, ready for Kelly to start making his endlessly repeated observations on the way fools engineer their own downfall — a topic that was of no small relevance in the America of the 1950s.

Kelly wasn’t afraid to experiment, either.  He was constantly breaking the tacit ‘reality’ of the strip; his characters knew they were in a comic decades before the clever self-referential cartoonists of the 1980s.  There’s even a great sequence where the newspaper decides to run a comic strip, and Howland gives Porky a tutorial on the techniques of the medium by pointing out the very elements of the strip they’re in (“The next merriment pops up when you see the copyright notice”).  He also played around with the funny-animal aspect, making some finely pointed points about the irony inherent in making your main characters intelligent animals, while tiptoeing around the delicate subject of what, exactly, they are supposed to eat.  (More than once, a character decides that Pogo himself would make a good meal.)  There are hidden jokes, linguistic puns, and meta-references to spare, at a time when almost no one else was engaging in such humor, and Kelly even engages in some heartbreaking melodrama; read the strips where Albert is accused of having eaten an absurdly adorable puppy dog and try not to choke up.  Kelly was sometimes so teeming with jokes that he absolutely stuffed the strip with them; the word balloons are practically overflowing compared to most of his contemporaries, and he would often toss in two or three punchlines in a single strip.  (One of my favorites involves Seminole Sam trying to sell the natives a bunch of pins, on his claim that they contain hilarious stories engraved on the head by a minuscule insect.  He starts reading one, which clearly consists of a passage from a geometry textbook.  He confesses:  ”Gentlemen, apparently I’ve mixed the pins.  This one seems to bear the Constitution of a small southern republic in a foreign tongue.”  That’d be more than enough for most strips, but Kelly has Albert provide the capper:  ”Go ahead and finish her — she starts out funny.”)

Through the Wild Blue Wonder, which was released late last year, is the first of a dozen books, which will form the entirety of Pogo‘s run, as well as a bunch of bonus material.  There’s tons of great stuff still to come; much of the political stuff is later on, including the incredible Jack Acid Society Handbook promised as an extra; essential characters like Mam’selle Hepzibah, Bun Rab, P.T. Bridgeport, Tammananny Tiger, and Molester Mole MacCarony have yet to make an appearance; and there will be an increased number of color strips as well as plentiful background notes and sketches.  So even at the high price, there’s no chance I won’t be in this one for the long haul.  And, of course, it’s churlish to mention this as a positive, but the sole good thing to come out of Kelly’s early death at age 60 is that he didn’t stick around long enough for Pogo to become an embarrassment.  Collectors — especially those who aren’t as familiar enough with Kelly as he has long deserved — should join me in locking this one down for the duration; and since it is, after all, that ol’ ephemeral art form, comics, casual fans should feel free to snatch it up from the library, read through it on a tear, and join me in the frustration of waiting for the next installment to appear.  Either way, this is simply a must-read collection of comics by one of the greatest creators ever to put his hand to the form.  Thanks to Fantagraphics, Pogo will avoid the fate of the comic created in-strip by Howland and Church, who draw it on planks of wood which are later eaten by Albert (he thinks they’re sandwiches).  ”Oh, the daily hilarity yo’ paper lost when you ate that strip,” laments Howland, leaving Albert to provide the kicker:  ”I will say it tasted funny.  We might of had another Foxey Grampa!”

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

When I was young, like many idealists, I still believed that America was exceptional.  I still believe that this country is an exceptional one; there is still no nation that so fiercely enshrines the rights of man in its very foundational document and so vociferously defends them as part of its entire existence.  But age, time, and the hard, hard lesson that good does not always triumph over evil or freedom over oppression have taught me that the American people are no more free of prejudice and bigotry than those of any other country, and in some regards they are substantially worse.  From time to time, this grim fact — and the concomitant truth that democracy can be quite incompatible with freedom — makes itself explicit, and last night in North Carolina was one of them.

It wasn’t the first.  It won’t be the last.

Even today, with my country’s political system more bought and sold than ever, and with intolerance making a bold new bid for the public embrace, I try not to become a cynic.  The worst political ideas ever wrought by nations have been the work of cynics.  It is the irrational fears and ancient prejudices of the stupidly sincere that form the raw materials of votes like the one in North Carolina, but it is the cynicism and calculation of the political class that channels them into the means by which they consolidate their power, using it to choke the life out of the very people who elected them.  But it’s sorely tempting at times like this to despair about how ignorant and backward Americans have revealed themselves to be on the issue of gay rights.

The right of gay men and women to marriage equality is predictably recognized in Canada, and in Europe’s more progressive quarters, but what is more surprising is that it is becoming the law of the land in bastions of Catholicism:  Spain, Argentina, and Belgium have all legalized gay marriage, and Mexico City now allows them as well.  Civil unions are allowed almost everywhere in Europe, and increasingly in conservative South America (there is something especially disgraceful about being behind Colombia on any civil rights issue).  Same-sex marriages are even allowed in South Africa, a country that still enshrined institutional racism under the color of law as recently as the mid-1990s; perhaps it was their history of ugly racial discrimination that made them so quick to tie it to anti-homosexual bigotry.  It is not for nothing that it has been pointed out that the last time North Carolina amended its constitution was to prohibit marriage between races.

Let’s be perfectly clear on this:  those who oppose same-sex equality are on the wrong side of history.  They are being left behind in almost every corner of the globe, and they will eventually lose.  Whatever the origins of their position — the inculcated brainwashing of tradition, the baseless irrationality of religious indoctrination, or the outright bigotry of repulsion and hatred of gays — they represent what Hunter Thompson called “the forces of old and evil”.  Those at the vanguard of this regressive movement come up with all sorts of justifications that make it seem as if they are not simply indulging in the repression of a minority, but none of them hold a thimbleful of rhetorical water.  For all the talk of sacrament and tradition, marriage has always been a social construct, and thus may be defined however we agree to define it without damaging the concept.  Western society has gone through dozens of permutations of toleration of gays as well as dozens of permutations of intolerance against them.  There is simply no credible evidence whatsoever that gay marriage does measurable harm to heterosexual unions, or that the children of homosexuals are doomed to neurotic misery; what evidence there is suggests just the opposite.  And, just as with that other American bugaboo, marijuana, the harm that can be suffered from homosexuality stems almost exclusively from the fact of the bias and social and legal prejudices against it.  If there were no such thing as homophobia, the whole idea of homosexuality would not even be an issue.  Really, all you have to do to judge the moral quality of the anti-gay movement is look at the people who have sought most feverishly to eradicate homosexual behavior:  the statist paranoiacs of the Stalinist era, the indiscriminate torturers of the Catholic Inquisition, the holy terrorists of the fundamentalist Islamist fringe, and the universally reviled Nazi party, who condemned pink triangles to die alongside yellow stars.

But being wrong, being doomed to ultimate failure, does not mean being denied long-term success.  There has been bigotry against homosexuals for as long as the concept has existed ; indeed, as Gore Vidal has argued, the whole conception of homosexual identity — as opposed to the naturally occurring and entirely uncontroversial phenomenon of homosexual behavior — would never have emerged were it not for the prejudice against it.  The notion that women are human beings and deserve to be treated as something other than breeding stock or domestic implements is a relatively recent one, and has failed to catch on in many quarters; it still meets with fierce resistance even here at home.  And America continued its unbearable mistreatment of blacks far longer than any reasonable person might expect, and bears the scars of its badly healed racial wounds even today.  North Carolina has made it clear that the forces of injustice and intolerance will not easily surrender their power.

The comparison with African-American civil rights has become commonplace, but it is not lightly chosen.  There can be no decent defense of racism or homophobia; both are reducing a human being to a category and then denying them their rights based on their occupation of that category.  Both are punishing a person for being who they are.  But both enjoy widespread support that cannot be reasoned out, just as it was never reasoned in.  Both are — with a few glorious exceptions, which are among the few reasons to be hopeful for the future of mankind — so firmly stitched into the corrupted minds of their followers that they are likely to loosen their grip only with the coming of death.  And both are common enough that they are likely to stand forever in the way of a democratic consensus that blacks should have access to the same justice system as whites, and that homosexuals should have access to the same marital rights as heterosexuals.  But that, of course, is why the courts exist, and is as fine an example as anyone could want as to why the federal judiciary must be allowed to operate independent of the popular will.

When LBJ used his mastery of the senate, the political clout he had accumulated from his dealmaking with the G.O.P., and the public sympathy accompanying the death of John F. Kennedy to push the civil rights issue, he knew it would be finally determined by the Supreme Court, and saw it through despite a social climate and political hostility that are nearly unimaginable today.  Today, our Democratic president lacks such mastery, lacks such sympathy, squanders what little clout he possesses, and may not even have the will to make things happen regarding gay marriage.  He also faces an entirely different Supreme Court, one which has been stocked with reliable ideologues in the last 20 years of conservative rule.  But for now, there can be no doubt that the only way the matter of gay marriage can be settled is in the Supreme Court.  The reason that states with significant anti-gay movement have pursued their agendas through amendments to their state constitutions is because they know laws against gay marriage are de jure unconstitutional, insofar as they are universally in opposition to the Equal Protection Clause and create a specific group against which it is permissible to deny civil rights.  They also know that taking their case to the nation’s highest court poses a dangerous risk; even the likes of Scalia and Alito might not be quick to rule against anti-gay legislation, knowing it would make hash out of the Civil Rights Act and dozens of other anti-discriminatory rulings the court has made in the past.  And it is, thankfully, still pretty well unthinkable that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage would have a chance to pass.  The anti-gay movement has a legitimate reason to fear federal action on the issue, which is the reason for all the tinkering about with state constitutions — ironically, from the very same side of the political spectrum who are forever grousing about activist judges and Obama’s alleged violation of our sacred constitution.

But the death of a thousand cuts will not work here.  The homophobes and bigots need a decisive blow to behead their enemy, and each little wound they inflict only engenders more sympathy in their opponents (and, increasingly, in the younger demographic that doesn’t seem to give a shit about the issue).  One of the modern conservative movement’s founding fathers (and himself no friend of homosexualists) once described the ethos as that of a man “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’.”  This is entirely apt, and while entirely quixotic as an organizational goal, even a bit noble at times.  But today’s conservatives, especially those involved in the anti-gay marriage movement, have scaled it down to a pettier and uglier goal:  they are standing atop civilization, yelling ‘go back!’.  Alexander Hamilton wrote that the rights of man are not to be found in documents or in law, and “can never be erased or obscured by mortal power”; they are written with a sunbeam, he said, and shoot through every fiber of the human soul.  Conservatives have a chance now to stand aside and let that sunbeam through, see how its cleansing brightness illuminates and colors all corners of our society with hope and justice.  Instead, they are reaching for pots of black paint to forever obscure the very notion of equality.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Now that we’re two years removed from its now rather notorious series finale, it seems like a good time to revisit Lost, and to consider the lessons it imparted to its viewers, to its inheritors, and to its medium.  The consensus, if such a thing can even be said to exist in the fractious post-Internet world of television, is that Lost is at best a deeply flawed success and at worst a game-changing failure, a show that tapped into a timely hysteria for serialized enigmas but left little behind but a scrap heap of inferior imitators; this perception is compounded by the fact that, because people are always more prone to remember the last thing you did than the first, its legacy cannot be spoken of without mention of its last episode, which is widely perceived as a clumsy cop-out, the disappointing payoff of a massive investment of time and emotion.

Having re-watched the entire series, I think this view of the show is more than a bit unfair, and highlights the inconsistencies in our selective memories when it comes to television — a medium which, it is true, encourages just that sort of short-sightedness because of its fragmented and ephemeral quality. While Lost is sometimes remembered as a noble failure because of the uneven quality of its later seasons, The Sopranos, which suffered similar loss of focus as it began to gray, is viewed in a much more positive light, and Twin Peaks – whose second-season calamities far outnumbered its first-season miracles — might as well have been filmed on strips of gold.  Of course, the latter shows earned that indulgence by presenting a much higher standard of quality in the first place; Lost at is best was rarely as good as The Sopranos at its worst (though much better than Twin Peaks at its nadir).  But most of the show’s post mortem writers seem to have come to bury and not to praise, and there’s a risk that we might forget what made it so compelling in the first place.

Lost‘s biggest problem, if you credit the conventional one-liner that’s become as much part of its mythology as the Smoke Monster, is that the writers were “making it up as they went along”.  Here’s a little peek inside the creative process, though, for the uninitiated:  all writers make things up as they go along.  That, in fact, is what writing is, especially in a specialized collaborative medium like television, and even more especially in serial fiction.  There are precious few people who could plot out a complex series with a sprawling cast and a ridiculous amount of backloaded information years ahead of time and have it make any sense; no one wants to see a television show as plotted by Harry Stephen Keeler.  One of the only shows to accomplish this, in fact, was the universally acclaimed (and criminally underwatched) HBO series The Wire.  And its ability to pull off this astonishing task — even when, by the fifth season, the levers and pulleys were starting to show — was one of the reasons it was universally acclaimed.  Lost didn’t have that luxury; it was a network show, and a dazzlingly expensive one at that, so it was beholden to all sorts of intangibles that kept it from sticking to any kind of master plan even if one had existed.   And since its creative staff couldn’t admit what every writer knows — that in any kind of long-form fiction, there is a significant amount of deviation and improvisation over time — they had to pretend otherwise.  And since the pretense was so obvious, fans became angry at being told the lie they themselves demanded.

That significant expense (Lost remains the most costly ongoing series in American network TV history) brings up another point:  the show looked then, and looks now, fucking fantastic.  It was one of the first television series to take advantage of hi-definition digital television at its zenith; it was meant to be seen in hi-def.  And though the isolation and indulgence of filming in Hawaii took its toll on the cast and crew, it certainly didn’t hurt the way the show looked; almost every scene on the island is eye-tearingly gorgeous, and I’d be willing to bet that some of the disappointment in later seasons was as much to do with the fact that the plots took them off the island as it did the quality of the writing itself.  The pilot to Lost is the most expensive ever made, but it is also one of the most perfect creations television has ever delivered.   The notion that TV has become more like movies generally refers to the increased level of quality in recent years of small-screen programming, but in Lost, we have a show that looks as good as a movie as well, a fact that is in danger of being lost because our culture is steadily losing its appreciation of the visuals in visual media.

The acting on Lost was inconsistent, but it was rarely terrible.  It’s another factor that often gets overlooked, for a number of reasons; for one, few of its cast have gone on to bigger or better things, and for another, the three main characters were played by the three least interesting actors:  Matthew Fox could deliver moments of emotional power as Jack Shephard, but he was just as likely to give himself over to calf-eyed gurning; Evangeline Lilly was as dull an actress as Kate Austen was a character; and Josh Holloway didn’t often transcend the requirements of his modeling days as Sawyer.  But Lost was an ensemble cast, and regardless of their work since, the actors outside of that quickly abandoned central triangle often brought their A games.  Michelle Rodriguez and Adewale Akinnouoye-Agbaje were hypnotic in their roles as people irreparably damaged by their violent pasts (and were the prime example of the show’s folly in killing off its most interesting characters too soon); Yunjin Kim was a terrific find, and the show made great use of quirky supporting actors like Ken Leung and Jeremy Davies; and two of its most important roles — Terry O’Quinn’s John Locke and Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus — were played masterfully, to the degree that almost every scene one or the other of them is in is a scene that’s worth watching.  Even in the most absurd moments (as with Jeremy Davies’ wacky adventures in time) or the most unrewarding characters (Hiroyuki Sanada’s inexplicable Shaolin monk), no one phoned it in from the big island.

The show’s scripting was its Achilles’ heel.  Its dialogue was capable of coughing up memorable lines, but it was rarely great and often silly.  Its (generally clever) structural format, as well as the need to fill space as the show’s popularity led to one new season after another, often necessitated egregious padding.  Most of the worst of this involved Kate, but there were also unforgettable duds like Hurley’s imaginary friend, the utter miscue that was Nikki and Paulo, and, of course, “Stranger in a Strange Land”.  It’s nothing short of astounding that “Jack’s tattoos” hasn’t become cultural shorthand for a wet shit of an episode from an otherwise excellent show the way “jumping the shark” has come to mean the end of a show’s useful life.  Lost wasn’t good at being clever, and it frequently lost the thread of its own tale, and it failed miserably at making any kind of moral statement.  (I dare you to give a meaningful summary of why Jacob and the Man in Black were at each other’s throats, or what point of view either they or their minons represented.)  It made about as much sense as any show about magnetic anomalies, time travel, and smoke monsters could ever make, which is to say none at all.  It wasn’t even particularly good at plotting.

But what it was good at — what it was supremely, unprecedentedly, and stunningly good at — was storytelling.  From the very first episode until approximately midway through the fifth, there wasn’t a single episode that failed to do an amazing job of stringing action sequences together in order to create in the viewer an almost tangible need to find out what happened next.  This isn’t the most vital function of art; I’d even argue that it’s a largely superfluous one.  But when it’s well done, the effect is as staggering as watching someone catch a bullet with his teeth.  It’s something that soap operas are very good at; it’s the quality with which Stephen King has become this country’s most successful author.  It is nothing more than the art of telling not a meaningful or enlightening or beautiful story, but an effective one, and Lost had it in spades.  Its cliffhangers dangled like a condemned man’s noose; its emotional moments — its revelations and reunions, especially — possessed the power of a prizefighter’s punch to the gut. It was expert at managing what Roland Barthes identified as the proairetic code — the sequences and actions that propelled the reader into the narrative, and the way those sequences and actions helped impart overall meaning to the text.  The most amazing trick of the proairetic code, one capable of being mastered by something as low as wrestling or as high as Shakespeare, is to involve the reader in the creation of the text; its complexity creates conspiracy, and inspires the viewer to create narratives where none may exist.  This was obvious from the very beginning with Lost, as it provided us with enough narrative hooks and background enigmas that we couldn’t help partake in speculation and and theorizing.  Thus did it engender a world even more complex and full of wonder than even the show’s creators were capable of imagining:  Lost had millions of writers instead of dozens, and the fact that the worlds they created weren’t real, or even relevant, doesn’t make the aggregate richness they added to the experience any less wondrous.

The show did other things well (it’s quite tightly directed overall, and it took fine advantage of new media to enhance its watchability), other things poorly (it never talked when it could scream, and it encouraged certain aspects of the now-dominant nerd culture a bit too shamelessly), and other things fair-to-middlin’ (Michael Giacchino’s score was often loopy and obvious, but occasionally brilliant).  But one thing it gets blamed for is the endless secession of imitators, none of which could hold a candle to it, that it inspired.  So high were its ratings and so tightly did it lock in to its cultural moment that no one can let it go; even today, subpar serial tales of mystery pollute the airwaves, giving us goopy drama with a creamy center of slowly doled-out secrets.  But Lost no more bears the blame for the persistence of shows like The River and Alcatraz than Quentin Tarantino deserves to be called a third-rate director just because all the hip, casually violent crime dramedies that came in the wake of Pulp Fiction were third-rate.  If something successful can be imitated, there will be imitations, especially in Hollywood, and Lost deserves credit for its frequently masterful handling of serial storytelling, not blame for the fact that someone paid a lot of money to get us to watch The Event.

It’s the quality of immediacy, of addiction — the desperate need to find out what, if anything, comes next — that made Lost such a runaway success, but I wonder if, in the long run, it’s also what’s worked against it.  The qualities that make it easy to mock and deride — the Jackface, the weird science-fictional flip-flops of the last two seasons, the frayed edges we all spotted once we decided a fast one was being pulled on us (and honestly, no possible ending to Lost would have satisfied its fans), Michael braying for WAAAAALT — are bits and pieces, quick to come to mind and lots of fun to huck tomatoes at.  But the things we loved about it aren’t easy to remember, because they require us to go through the elaborate and time-consuming process of sitting down and watching it again, and remembering the cold hand we felt dragging us from episode to episode, and the maddening but thrilling sensation of the credits appearing at the most frustrating possible moment.  That mastery of storytelling, and that cruel knowledge of just how to pull our strings, is what made Lost such a massive success when it was on — and what made it so easy to forget once it stopped.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Hello, friends and readers!

As you probably already know if you are strangely obsessed with the financial peculiarities of people on the internet, I am a full-time freelance writer, and at the moment, 100% of my drastically tiny income is derived from writing.  And although I would never suggest that I am your equal in matters of hygiene, physical attractiveness, or basic human decency, I am like you in that I got bills to pay.

Many people reach out to their readers with donation drives; I am not one of them.  I work for a living, and don’t feel comfortable taking handouts for any number of reasons.  First, I prefer to think that the money I get is earned, not out of any abiding love of capitalism or self-reliance, but because it pleases me to think there’s at least one thing I’m good enough at that someone will pay me to do it.  Second, as you also probably already know, I did something pretty disgraceful and stupid earlier in my career, and I don’t feel like I’ve earned enough trust from my readers to ask them to pay me for doing nothing.  So you won’t see a big yellow glad-hand button on this site anytime soon.

But money I need, and if money you got, I’m happy to suggest ways for you to spend it.

First and most urgently, there’s the direct approach.  I offer a number of exciting and somewhat unique services via this website, all of which may be purchased by you at a surprisingly reasonable price.  Real people like yourself have taken advantage of them, to the overall enhancement of their lives.  Might your life be similarly enhanced?  Why don’t we find out together?  These services include, but are not limited to:

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- Short story subscription service.  Starting in June, I will be offering a new short story, delivered exclusively via e-mail only to subscribers, each month to those who join the plan.  Higher-level members will receive additional materials and even a short novella once per year!  Help revive the great pulp tradition, only in a much stranger and less relatable fashion.

- Mysterious boxes of thrift.  For a small fee, I will travel to a nearby thrift store, purchase a small number of items selected according to a rigorous but impenetrable process, and send them to you in the mail.  For a bit more, I will drive to another city or town, purchase a larger number of items via the same enigmatic criteria, and deliver them to you via U.S. post.  Thrillingly odd!

- Textual gaslighting.  You send me:  money and randomly selected items from your home upon which things can be written.  I send you:  the same items, but this time with various cryptic, disturbing, mysterious, threatening, and/or unsettling messages, slogans and other forms of unnerving one-way communication.  Frighten your spouse!  Drive your roommates insane!  Not for gambling!

If you have any inquiries, special requests, or a desire to learn exactly what the hell I think I’m doing here, please send me an e-mail; you can learn more about these strikingly special services by clicking here, on the “American Milk Solids Council” logo on the side menu, on the chubby self-delusional aristocrat logo above, on the “menu de l’offre” link at the top of the page, or on the “PURCHASE EXCITING LUDIC LIVE INTERNET HANDICRAFTS” option on the Links menu.  Payment may be made via cash or money order, or via PayPal:  leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

I am, of course, also available to hire as a freelance writer.  I have 25 years’ experience and a vast range of writing skills; I have worked for dozens of satisfied clients at alternative weeklies, websites, local and national magazines, trade and consumer publications, advertising agencies and media design firms, educational publishers, and other private companies.  I have written corporate newsletters, advertising copy, album liner notes and DVD packaging copy, record reviews, film reviews, book reviews, television reviews, restaurant reviews, interviews, features, textbooks, magazine articles, fiction, humor, news reportage, obituaries, and everything in between.  I have written two books and contributed to three more.  There is no kind of writing assignment I can’t handle — on time, in tone, when and how you need it.

If you’re interested in hiring an experienced, efficient, and talented writer for your project, paper, or any other required writing, please consider me.   A brief selection of my work can be found by clicking here, on the distressed robot head, atop the page on “Portfolio”, or in the links sidebar.  If you’re looking for longer-term assignments and wish to view my CV or résumé, or if you’d like additional credits or items from my portfolio to help you make your hiring decision, please e-mail me here or at leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

If you prefer a more indirect way of giving me money, perhaps you’d like to purchase my latest book, If You Like The Sopranos.  The first of a series by the fine folks at Limelight Editions, the book deals with the “Century of Crime”, in which a rising tide of urban organized crime was reflected in popular culture — film, television, literature, even music and video games — culminating in the development of The Sopranos, a show that forever changed the way we viewed both organized crime and television.  Well-reviewed and containing a plenitude of tips for even veteran crime-show watchers, it’s available at a peach of a price by clicking here, on the pork-fed sociopath above,  at the top of the page where it says “BUY MY BOOK”, or on the self-evident sidebar locations.  Buy enough copies, and I may get some royalties — or another book deal.

In addition, please watch this space — I’m hoping to make an announcement within the next two weeks about the availability for purchase of my next book, a collection of short humor entitled Moods from Marbletown.  It’ll be available as POD from Lulu.com, with the majority of the profit coming to me and not to middlemen.  If you have any inquiries about my books, again, please e-mail me:  leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.

There are also plenty of ways to support me and my work without spending a dime.  Obviously, I would prefer that dimes be spent, as my creditors do not accept the clicking of a “Like” button as legal tender, but my name is my name, and I appreciate any and all support you care to give me:

You can visit my Tumblr at First World Problems and learn about the intolerable suffering of white people in America.

You can listen to the outstanding, award-nominated podcast Wasted Words, on which I am a regular guest panelist.

You can purchase the AV Club’s Inventory…

or Chunklet’s Indie Cred Test, both of which feature many contributions from me.

You can get a load of the High Hat, an internet journal of arts and culture I was pleased to write for and edit for several years.

You can purchase this issue of the excellent magazine Burning Ambulance, in which I have a featured article on fascist style.

And, of course, you can follow me on the usual social media suspects:  Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, and Yelp!.

Again, please watch this space for announcements of future projects.  I encourage and appreciate your custom, and those of you who put some money my way are guaranteed a place in Heaven if by some hilarious misunderstanding I am ever elected God.  You can always contact me via e-mail (leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com), telephone (210-569-4082), or postal service (4051 Tallulah Drive; San Antonio, TX 78218).  All inquiries welcome, all projects considered, all offers 100% genuine.  Thank you for your continued attention.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Some time ago, a friend of mine was discussing the painful direction criticism has taken in the internet age.  He suggested, in a bit of phrasing that has struck me as extremely perceptive ever since, that part of the problem is that people no longer approach art with any sense of humility.  Although the democratization of culture and the tumbling down of the walls that arbitrarily separated ‘high’ culture from ‘low’ has largely been a good thing, it has also birthed a generation so enamored of their own opinions, and so distrustful of having something pulled over on them, that they seem incapable of experiencing culture as something transcendent, something capable of instilling in them unfamiliar feelings, something that requires them to learn something new or experience something confusing or strange.  A generation raised on the idea that every opinion is worth publicizing and every cultural product is worth reviewing finds this unacceptable; unfamiliarity, discomfort and ambiguity make them feel dumb, so they eschew it, and approach every aesthetic encounter as something to be placed in a box that has already been labeled and slotted into an already-completed hierarchy.  That this is precisely the wrong way to approach art does not seem to trouble them.

Similarly, in a discussion earlier with another friend, he mentioned that he encounters so many people who have completely bought into the notion of themselves as special and unique creative snowflakes that they drag the entire artistic process through the mud, presenting their art as something undignified, a scruffy child they happened to birth that, if it has any function whatsoever, is to reflect glory on their own very specialness.  How can you have any dignity in your art, he asked, when you look at your performance as nothing more than an excuse to publicize your own oh-so-interesting bio, when the number and status of your credits is more important than the quality of the work?  The important thing is that you’ve written a dozen webcomics, not whether the webcomics are any good; the important thing is that you studied under a well-known dance instructor, not whether you learned anything from her; the important thing is that you’ve seen a thousand movies, not whether the majority of them were worth watching, or whether you learned anything from them or had any insightful criticisms to offer after seeing them.

Paul Fussell, in his bitingly insightful book Class, pointed out that one of the characteristics of the modern classless Bohemian — the people who he called “Class X” for their attempt to break out of the unspoken but strangulating economic and social traps that surround us from before we are born — was that they could look at any contemporary work of art and imagine themselves creating something similar.  This is all to the good, and there is nothing wrong with the idea that we take a proprietorial attitude towards art; indeed, it is essential that we read like a writer, that we listen like a musician, that we view like a filmmaker.  All of us should take a creator’s view of art, not a consumer’s view.  But as we often do in American culture, we have overshot the goal.  We have gone beyond viewing art as creators; we have started to view it as jaded rivals, or scornful superiors, or worst of all, patrons.  We have stopped looking at art as something glorious and mysterious, as aspirational, and started looking at it with the eyes of a latter-day Viennese emperor, wondering if a piece of music might not have a few too many notes in it.

From this sin of the art wagging the artist, none of us are exempt.  In the mediated age, we have all come to be convinced of our specialness; we cannot abide the idea that we might lack any given artistic talent, because since we have fully committed to the esteem-building notion that artists are special people, we must be artists, because who will admit to not wanting to be special?  And so it is that we elevate our artistic judgments to the level of artistic achievements — not because our criticism is artful, but because we must always be doing art.  We convince everyone that it is the self-made qualities of our art that makes it special, its ‘original’ plot or its clever structure or its mere status of being better than awful, and our dignity crumbles, because merely creating well-crafted, well-executed art does not make us unique enough.  We don’t create art anymore because it is a raw, pulsating need, a wound that must be cauterized through the creative process; we do it because we all want to be artists, because artists are special.  We are not in bands because we have something to sing about; we are in bands because being in bands is something that you simply have to do.

Another of my friend’s comments struck home with particular harshness to me:  he rightly complained about  comics writers who, having taken distressingly little time to come up with an idea worth writing, or crafting it into a script worth reading, then go on the hunt for artists because they can’t be arsed to learn how to draw themselves — thus showing a gory disrespect by rendering another person’s struggle to refine and perfect their own art into a mere functional component of their own attempt to be special.  That pained me, because I have been that guy.  It took me years to learn what a jackass I was being to the artists of my acquaintance, who were working just as hard to become good artists as I was to become a good writer, but whose efforts I did not respect because I couldn’t personally appreciate them.

For many years, it killed me — killed me – that I had no real musical talent. I can sing passably well, and write decent lyrics; I can even compose music in my head.   But whatever it is that allows your hands to translate what you hear inside to something that can be heard outside, I don’t have it.  And this ate at me.  I felt entitled to make music, because, well, after all!  I knew so much about music, and it brought me so much pleasure, and here I am, a creative person and all — why wouldn’t I be able to make music?  In all my attempts to do so, I showed a shameful lack of dignity and humility to the people I tried to collaborate with.  I viewed them as functionaries in service of my attempts to express my unique snow-flower-itude, instead of people who were on their own (far superior) creative paths who I was pulling away and distracting in service of my own ego.  I count as extraordinarily fortunate the day that I realized that, since there are a million people far better at music than I’ll ever be, and that I am good at other things, the world did not need me to be a musician, and that was okay.  I don’t have to be miserable all the time because I can’t play guitar.

And I, too, was one of those people who bought into the privilege of artistic creation, and that I was missing out if I wasn’t good at everything.  I didn’t have any perspective on my talent, because it was unthinkable to me that I couldn’t do something.  I think I’m a good writer, but I wasted years of my life, and uncountable hours of the time belonging to my friends with artistic talent, arrogantly trying to push my projects onto them.  I was approaching the art of comics with no humility; I had to be the one in charge.  I was trying to convince the world that I was the boss of art, when it was art making a fool of me.  Since then, I’ve learned what a pleasurable but complex thing a real artistic collaboration is, thanks to the patience and good graces of some truly talented partners.  Collaboration — especially collaboration with someone who has a talent you lack — isn’t about being in charge, or issuing orders.  It’s about surrender.  It’s about giving up the sensation of thinking you’re in charge of the creation, and learning to work with your partner in order to make something that is bigger than both your talents.  It’s about learning that artistic expression isn’t a fun way to express your personality; it’s a necessary way to transcend, to escape your personality.

Because technology has given us more access to art than we’ve ever had before, we’ve begun to devalue the great in favor of the new, the difficult in favor of the quick, and the art in favor of the personality of the artist.  We have stripped the process of its dignity and made it a button to be punched on a fast-food menu; we have subjugated our humility before art into a situation where the artist must abase themselves merely for the art to be worthy of our attention.  Until we re-learn this humility before art — until we admit that, while we are all capable of creation, none of us are bigger than the culture we have collectively created — we will keep putting the cart before the horse, and getting nowhere.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

I’m glad you asked!  My very good friend Cori and I just returned from a week-long trip down into Cajun country, and while I know no one comes here for my travelogues, sit through this one, and I’ll return to the pointless political griping and obscure 10%er comedy in a day or two.

We set out last Tuesday in the old reliable Chickwagon, my busted ’99 Saturn wagon, and, after loading up on a few supplies at HEB and Buc-Ees, we stopped for lunch at Luling’s City Market.  Now, admittedly, I’ve missed out on getting to strap on my meat bag at places like Smitty’s or Snow’s, but I have eaten a shitload of barbeque all over this country, and I never had any better than City Market.  You know when a joint has been in business for decades with only three things on the menu, they’ve learned to do it right, and City Market’s incredibly flavorful pork ribs, ridiculously tender brisket, and perfectly made beef sausage are reason enough for this state’s eternal existence.

From there, we headed up the road to Texas’ Palmetto State Park.  This is one of my favorite Texas parks, not only for its natural beauty — featuring an uncharacteristically tropical environment in otherwise arid South Texas and lots of fauna found only here in all of the U.S. — but also for its buildings, constructed when the place was a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s and featuring unique National Parks architecture.  We enjoyed some bold ducks, fast-moving frogs, and grand views of the San Marcos River, and I read about the camaraderie and opportunity engendered by the CCC and wondered why no politician has the guts to suggest such a thing today.

Moving on to Houston, we checked into our hotel — a Howard Johnson on the outer rim of the city’s downtown area, operated by a Hindu family who helpfully stocked a Bhagavad-Gita alongside the Gideon Bible — and headed to Minute Maid Park.  I hadn’t seen the post-Astrodome stadium in person; placed in the confines of the city’s old Union Station, it’s actually a very good space with fine parking, very good amenities, nice line-of-sight views from all over, top-notch climate control, and overall a new-old-style park vibe not too different from Camden Yards.  The only thing I really have against it is that stupid fucking hill in the outfield, which accomplishes nothing and is a constant risk to anyone chasing down a long fly; level that thing and you’ve got a pretty solid ballpark.  We were there to see the final two spring training games before the beginning of the regular season, and happily, the ‘Stros were playing my beloved White Sox.  The Good Guys won the Tuesday night game and tied the Wednesday Businessman’s Special, and we had great seats right behind the visitor’s dugout, so it was a blast despite the meaningless nature of the games.

After the game, we headed east on the I-10 towards Lafayette, intending to camp out overnight in Lorrain Park, in Calcasieu Parish.  Unfortunately, our directions were completely off, and despite the assistance of a couple of well-meaning locals, we were unable to find the park at all.  Since it was already getting all dark-and-stormy-night up in there, and we didn’t relish the idea of trying to put up our tents in the middle of the night, we caved in an stayed at a hotel in a town with the unlikely name of Iowa, Louisiana.  (There was also a very sad, minimalist-looking water park there which created in our minds all kinds of unanswerable questions.  Who would build a water park in the middle of nowhere?  Who would go there?  Why did it look simultaneously brand new and abandoned?  Isn’t southern Louisiana one big water park anyway?)  The hotel was fine, but we were eager to hit the road again, and we soon ended up here.

Lafayette, the largest city in Acadiana, has a reputation for great food — in fact, we didn’t have a bad meal the whole time we were there — but the food at Jolie’s Louisiana Bistro was far and away the best.  It was probably, now that I think of it, the best meal I’ve had in years.  The place is renowned for its local sourcing of ingredients and new takes on regional classics; I had an impossibly crisp and light piece of fried catfish and a side of sweet corn grits that made me wish I’d had them this way my whole life.  An appetizer of lightly fried pimiento cheese and a pre-meal French 75 cocktail were also tremendous, and I left feeling completely sated, which was kind of a drag, because our next stop was Avery Island, home of the world’s most famous hot sauce:  Tabasco.

It’s hard to talk about the tour without feeling like you’re being a corporate shill, no matter how much you like the product (and I like Tabasco a lot).  But it’s a product with an amazing history, and it’s one that does a lot for the community and the environment, even if their promotional film was a little iffy (the bit about “reorganizing the workforce” after the Civil War was pretty gross, and one can’t help but notice it’s basically the same people doing the agricultural work now as it was in 1864).  The product is all-natural and delicious, and if I hadn’t been so damn full I would have gorged myself on the crawfish etouffe available at the company store.  (I did get a huge bag of seeds and skins to make a shrimp boil with, though, and it made the car smell slightly and pleasantly of Tabasco for the rest of the trip.)  We headed down through the rest of Cajun country, down into Houma for a rap sesh with my man Swamp Thing, and were struck by the weird juxtaposition of incredible natural beauty and a thriving, all-consuming oil industry that gives locals much-needed jobs but does its best to wreck all that natural beauty.

After nabbing some crazy-good Cajun jerky at a gas station right in the middle of the oil boom, we cruised into New Orleans, where we checked into the Intercontinental — a beautiful place far too classy for the likes of us — and settled in.  The service in the hotel was amazing, but the service outside was pretty shabby; I had to wait over half an hour to get my car back from the valets and no one helped me take a very heavy bag up to my room — I had to get special permission from someone to borrow a luggage cart.  But overall, it was a great stay.  After a swell dinner of beer, hot boudin, and richly soaked deli meats at Butcher, a sandwich joint operated by Cochon‘s Donald Link, we met our pal Kevin O’Mara at Bellocq, the new bar run by the proprietors of Cure, one of my favorite joints in NOLA or anywhere.  Conversation was drunk and good, and I’ve put New Orleans at the top of my list of places to let the clock run out on what’s left of my louche life.  The next day was brunch at Court of Two Sisters, where the food and the jazz were both good but not great — albeit much improved by the place’s rich history.  We sat next to a bachelorette party that provided endless entertainment and stuffed ourselves on local favorites.  After some shopping in the French Quarter (where — you won’t believe this!  – there was some kind of street festival going on, I got myself a walking stick, making me the fanciest fat man in the South, and hit the road again.

We stayed the night at the Attakapas Wildlife Management Area, camping out in the primitive grounds of yet another gorgeous wilderness area cozied right up next to an oil refinery.  (Its mild glow and industrial buzz was like a giant night-light.)  The backroads were pretty busy with both oil workers and local fishermen, and the nature scene gave us a nice Werner Herzog moment as we spotted a snake being noisily and slowly devoured by a snake.  Somehow, I lost the frame to my tent and had to spend an uncomfortable night in the car, sitting cramped against the window and being devoured by mosquitoes; but it was a lovely night and a drop-dead beautiful morning as we headed back west.  We detoured down the Creole Nature Trail, soaking in the unmitigated beauty of one of the country’s loveliest drives; stops at the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Preserve, the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, and Holly Beach on the Gulf Coast (the view just a little spoiled by the presence of oil platforms everywhere on the horizon) were all hugely enjoyable and ridiculously photogenic — pictures are here if you want them.  The occasional absurdities (houses on stilts, neighborhood watch associations in remote towns of a few hundred people, crass Mountain-Dew-chugging litterbugs) couldn’t ruin our enjoyment of one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, just a few hundred miles away from home.

Now I’m back home and in dire need of sleep.  But if I might be permitted to end this pointless entry with something slightly meaningful:  folks, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but this country, which is messed up in a variety of ways, did something incredibly, indescribably right with its national and local parks systems.  They’re one of the greatest things we’ve ever done as a nation, and they’re perpetually in trouble of being defunded even though they offer an immeasurable amount of enjoyment and utility for a staggeringly small amount of money.  If you’re a single person, or a part of a couple, or part of a family with kids, you are cheating yourself and everyone you love if you’re not taking advantage of the parks system.  And while I realize that America’s driving habit is a decidedly mixed blessing — a lesson I could hardly miss on this trip in particular — I also know that one advantage our country has over the primitive rawness of Africa, the ancient cultural richness of Europe, and the grand sweep of civilization in Asia is that we are a huge place, full of almost limitless natural beauty, that has gone out of its way to make it incredibly easy for even the most cash-strapped traveler to see as much of it as he might care to see.  We are also a place of staggering, almost unbelievably diversity that expresses itself in the cultures of music, architecture, language, and food, and one of the best ways to see that is to just pile into the car and go, eschewing the flavorless sameness of the interstates for the byways and backroads.  No matter where you are in this country, you would be astonished at the richness and beauty to be found only a few dozen miles away from where you live.  Take advantage of the many, and free, resources available to you and hit the road as soon as you can.  It’ll provide you with some of the best memories you’ll ever have, and give you an appreciation for the people who built America that’s easy to miss when you’re stuck in a hometown rut.  Like it or hate it, the culture of driving in America lets us experience things that are wonderful, delicious, breathtaking, hilarious, and unique.  Break away from commuter culture and you’ll see.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

If only the eliminated contestants would disappear forever.  If only I had written this in March when it had a tiny amount of relevance.  If only I hadn’t filled out my actually NCAA brackets based on which team had the guys with the funniest names.  So many regrets.

Cultural Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Bears An Irrational Hatred of Dubstep But Isn’t Quite Sure What It Is vs. Guy Whose Only Opinion About Music Is That It Hasn’t Been Any Good Since 1982

Guy Who Constantly Makes Incredibly Petty Factual Corrections Preceded With The Word “Actually” vs. Woman Who Thinks That Being A Stickler For Grammar Is The Same Thing As Being A Literary Critic

Guy Who Scornfully Shits All Over Anything That Is Popular vs. Guy Who Thinks He Is Super Brave And Hip For Liking Popular Things

Guy Who Gets Strangely Upset About The Casting Of Black Actors In Genre Fiction Films vs. Woman Who Is Angrily Defensive About Reading Nothing But Young Adult Novels

Guy Who Claims To Really Hate Furries But Also Knows An Alarmingly Large Amount Of Details About Them vs. Guy Who Quotes Immanuel Kant When Talking About Giant Robot Cartoons

Guy Whose Reaction To Everything Is To Quote South Park vs. Woman Who Spends 14 Hours A Day Writing Stories Where Male Space Aliens Have Tender Sex With One Another

Woman Who Counts The Number Of People Of Color In The Cast Of A Television Show Before Watching It vs. Guy Who Gets Super Angry About Spike Lee Even When Spike Lee Is Not The Topic Of Conversation

Guy Who Has Written 2,217 Wikipedia Entries About The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers vs. Guy Who Complains That Video Game Commercials Have Girls In Them

Lifestyle Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Has A Google Alert Set Up To Inform Him If Anyone Makes A Disparaging Comment About Esperanto vs. Guy Who Thinks That Buying Beer That Costs Less Than $3 A Six-Pack Makes Him An Outlaw Rebel Hero

Woman Who Believes That If She Constantly Updates Her “Oenophile” Blog No One Will Notice That She’s A Sloppy Drunk vs. Guy Who Has Written 28,000 Words On Hundreds Of Identical-Tasting Potato Chips

Guy Who Thinks Everyone Else Is Stoned vs. Guy Who Thinks Everyone Else Is Gay

Guy Who Is Having A Hard Time Making Ends Meet On His $475,000 Annual Salary vs. Woman Who Just Can’t Believe How Everyone But Her Raises Their Children

Guy Who Is Creepily Obsessed With Guns But Has Never Owned One Or Fired One vs. Woman Who Is Always Trying To Convince You That Her All-Raw Food Vegan Diet Is Way More Awesome Than Steak

Guy Who Always Calls Celebrities By Their First Name Like He’s Their Best Friend Or Something vs. Woman Who Comes Up With Hilarious Puns On Celebrities’ Names To Show How Much She Hates Them

Guy Who Doesn’t Think There’s Anything Unusual About The Fact That He Only Dates Asian Women vs. Woman Who Has A Bunch Of “Girl Crushes” But Does Not Actually Date Real Humans Of Either Sex

Guy Who Claims To Be A Wealthy Businessman Even Though All He Does Is Post On Comment Boards All Day vs. Guy Who Is Mad About Teenagers Who Get Enthusiastic About Things He Has Already Known About For Years

Political Conference, Round 1

Guy Who Uses The Internet At His State College To Complain About Government Spending vs. Guy Who Spells America With Three Ks

Guy Who Thinks That The Existence Of Michael Moore Invalidates 250 Years Of Progressivism vs. Woman Who Calls Ann Coulter A Cunt But Gets Bent Out Of Shape At Fat Jokes About Jonah Goldberg

Guy Who Still Gets Super Pissed About The Lawsuit Involving The Old Lady Who Got Burned By McDonalds Coffee vs. Guy Whose Trust Fund Pays For His Tuition At Columbia But Eats Out Of Dumpsters

Woman Who Isn’t Racist But vs. Guy Who Doesn’t Hate Gays He Is Just Saying That’s All

Guy Who Makes $20,500 A Year And Hates All Those Liberal Jerks Who Want To Tax The Rich vs. Woman Who Awkwardly Tries To Express Cultural Solidarity With Her Cleaning Lady

Guy Who Thinks We Can’t Give People Unemployment Insurance Because Of What Stalin Did vs. Guy Who Pretends That His All-Consuming Interest In Marijuana Has Something To Do With Medicine

Guy Who Thinks There’s No Political Issue That Can’t Be Solved By Nuking Something vs. Guy Who Longs For The Triumphant Return Of The Free Soil Party

Guy Who Haunts IMDB Message Boards Complaining That Every Movie Is Proof Of A Vast Liberal Conspiracy vs. Woman Who Thinks Politics Are Just Unpleasant And Why Can’t We All Just Talk About Nice Things

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

I am a proud father of none, and all my children have been raised with the same care and thoughtfulness with which I monitor my own dietary and alcohol intake. As such, I have some advice for anxious young parents who may be considering some of the more extreme parenting techniques.

Should I breast-feed my children long after they reach the age of ten?  Like many modern parenting techniques, this falls into the category of ‘probably not actually harmful, but very unseemly’.  Much like parents who still dress their children when they are teenagers, or fathers who insist on slow-dancing with their daughters in front of everybody, it may be that forcing a child approaching junior high school age to depend on sucking on their mother’s breast in public for nourishment is not causing them any physical or psychological trauma, but it’s probably not helping, either.

Should I join the “Quiverfull” movement?  This refers to a Christian dominionist movement that encourages the creation of an army of true believers by means of having women bear as many children as they can until their birth canal collapses like a poorly maintained coal mine in Appalachia.  A good rule of thumb to follow is to not have more children than you can remember the names of without the use of a complicated mnemonic device; also, consider the fact that unless you are an android — and you are probably not, if you believe that Jesus wants you to have 24 kids — at a certain point it is not possible to actually take care of so many offspring.  So from that point forward, you are not actually raising children; you are raising grandchildren.

Is my child an “Indigo”?  As in most things, it is best to apply Occam’s Razor.  While it is possible that your self-centered, disobedient, bratty little shit is the super-powered, psionically gifted harbinger of a new age of human development, the odds are substantially better that he is just a jerk, and that you are an asshole of a parent.  Something to think about.

Should I attempt to have an orgasm while giving birth to my child?   There is a phrase:  ”Never whistle while you’re pissing.”  The gist of this is that you should focus on doing one thing at a time and not mix your pleasures too much, lest you spoil the enjoyment of one at the expense of the other.  And while we don’t wish to get into the whole abortion debate here, as a rule, it is considered unwise to do anything to a child immediately before it is born — inject it with drugs, tattoo it in festive colors, punch it very hard in the forehead — that you would not do to a child immediately after it is born.  Therefore, unless you are willing to shove a newborn baby’s face against your clitoris unti your are sexually satisfied, then it’s probably best to postpone your personal pleasure until after you have left the maternity ward.

My baby sometimes stays up late and cries.  What type of stick should I hit it with?  Ask your neighbor this same question about you.

I am preparing my child for a career in youth beauty pageants.  What steps should I follow?  Simply putting your daughter out in a world that features Bratz dolls, premium tequila, and Florida State University should be more than sufficient to prepare her to think of herself as alternately incredibly entitled and willing to completely debase herself.  However, if you want her to be a true champion in the competitive field of pre-adolescent sexual objectification, you might want to consider juvenile pole dancing lessons, a steady diet of hot Chee-tos and Red Bull, and encouraging her father to participate in Purity Balls.

I believe in a form of extremely committed parenting in which I do not leave my child alone for one second and am smug about it.  Is this the right path for me?  It goes without saying that you are smug about it, but thanks for pointing it out anyway.  I am sure your parenting choices are the correct ones, as there is no such thing as a correct form of parenting other than the one you have already decided to use.  You will likely enjoy the phone calls you receive on your child’s 34th birthday complaining about how the waiter at Dave & Busters seemed “emotionally distant”, and encouraging a claustrophobic dependency is sure to serve them well in the job market later in in life.  However, resist powerfully the urge to be their prom date, and recognize that some people, when asking “Could anyone be a better best friend than your mother?”, may not mean it rhetorically.

Contrary to your previous correspondent, I employ a form of parenting that involves ignoring my child completely so I can keep talking on the phone, and hoping he develops life skills by just picking them up from newspapers and whatnot.  I am pleased to hear it, and I’m sure that we’ve met before in various laundromats and supermarkets.  Kids today mostly eschew newspapers in favor of the internet, so make sure that phone has a good data plan, but otherwise your idea seems flawless and will almost certainly not result in the development of an affectless sociopath.  Please do consider at least some interaction with your children to assure them that they are loved and wanted; this can come in the form of screaming loud obscenities at them in a public place.

I am 13 and my parents say that this is too young to have a baby.  But my boyfriend is super hot and has a steady job at the Jiffy Lube, so I want to lock it down before I get bogged down in algebra class and gain a bunch of stress weight.  What is the best age for childbirth?  There is really no ideal age for childbirth, and since having a baby is all about you, feel free to pursue it whenever there is nothing good on TV.  As noted, children tend to raise themselves these days thanks to the world wide web.  If you live in area with poor Wi-Fi coverage, the job of raising your children can largely be performed by — depending on your socio-economic circumstances — state employees, your grandparents, or Salvadoran immigrants.  So just pull the trigger on that bad boy, and remember the most important thing:  no one can tell you how to raise your child.  You should be furious with this column for even suggesting otherwise.

Should I eat my placenta?  You are aware that there are such things as restaurants and supermarkets, aren’t you?

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

So, I’m not black.

I’m able to say that I’m not white, either — ironically, through the very mechanism of white privilege.  If you’re white and you choose to reject whiteness, you are able to do so only because you’re white.  People of color can never deny their color; they carry the evidence on their faces.  So when I tell people that I’m not white, all I’m doing is calling attention to the utterly arbitrary nature of race, and try to squirm my way out of the unwanted privilege (and the oppression on which it rests) that I was born into.

And when I hear people tell me, when I speak of the endless and daily indignities we heap on black Americans, that I suffer from something called “white guilt”, I understand it is meant to be an insult, but I can never quite understand why.  America is not unique in being marbled to the bone with racism, but our racism is unique; our relationship with the descendants of our slaves is like nothing else in any country, because we alone developed a system of slavery that carried into the modern era and was predicated entirely upon racism against blacks.  For me to feel white guilt seems the only reasonable reaction not only to the historical crimes people like me have committed against blacks for hundreds of years, but also to being part of and benefiting from the toxic soup of prejudice, bigotry and injustice that we force black Americans to swim in every day.  When I think about the unimaginable subjection blacks have encountered in my country’s history and the fact its legacy is a near-universal assumption that we’ve done enough to make up for it and from this point forward they’re on their own; when I think about the soul-stirring beauty and grace of what they have brought to our national culture, and in what base, worthless coin we’ve paid them back — what could a reasonable person feel other than guilt and shame?

I am poor, and I am from a low family, and I have had to claw and scrape to get by as have many people whose skin defines them as “white”.  But since the day I was born, I was spared the million daily debasements and indignities that I might have suffered if I’d been born black.  No matter what I try to do to erase my own privilege, and to make people like me aware of theirs, no matter how deep my embrace of what blacks have brought to our culture, I will never be one of them; I will never fully understand what they must feel and how they must live in a world that judges them in a way that, whatever barriers are set in my path and whatever blame is directed my way, it will never judge me.

But sometimes I think about them.  Recently I have thought a lot about Trayvon Martin, and the way the public has reacted to his death.  I think about the way the leader of our country, whose skin knows some things mine never will, has reacted to his death, and I think about how a man who wants to lead the country, and who looks a lot more like I do, reacted to that reaction.  I think about the way that so many people are trying to treat this incident — the dreadfully inevitable result of a law that could not have been better designed to end with the death of young black men; this incident which could not possibly be more about race – as if it were not about race.  And I feel like I should say something, but who am I to say anything?  Other people in a much better position than I to appreciate how an innocent young man ended up dead on the ground have already said it better.  His tragedy is not my tragedy.  All I own of it is my part in sustaining a culture where blacks are under suspicion merely for being alive.

It’s still not enough, though.  I have heard endless times since the election of Barack Obama that we live in a “post-racial society”, that racism is no longer a serious problem, that the “real” racism is something called “reverse racism” and that it injures only whites, that by talking about racism I am only making it worse.  I have been told to look on the president’s race as clear evidence that racism is over, as if sexism ended when the first woman was elected to high office or poverty ended the first time unemployment dipped below 10%.  I am assured that open racism has flattened away to nothing under the weight of public disapprobation, that the victories over the blatant violence and oppression of the past are enough and the improvements that have been made mean we can now stop fighting against all the still-present prejudices and cruelties, that we have collectively transformed the world through some mysterious event horizon of multiculturalism into a world where the only true form of tyranny comes from the stalking spectre of “political correctness”.

I hear all these things and try to make sense of them, but I can’t.  Because wherever I go to read a story about Trayvon Martin — who no more deserved to die than the purest, most innocent little white blonde girl who was tormented to death by some brain-fogged maniac — I see this:

- “Anyone recall the carjacking, torture, rape and slayings of a beautiful couple Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23 by 5 blacks?  MS media didn’t touch it.”

- “Jesse Jackson is a race baiting POS.  This had nothing to do with white people, so why is he bringing it up?  Because he is a shitsttarting racebaiting POS”

- “The media spin on this is amazing!  The race card is alive and well with the left.”

- “Nigger tried to front, got owned by a gun.”

- “Blacks ruin every community in the U.S.”

- “Common sense dictates that when black men stop being sperm donors and instead become responsible fathers we will see the end of stories like this one.”

- “O PLEASE – tell the truth.  The neighborhood had the same problems that exist in any ‘diversified neighborhood’ The neighborhood is a Gated Ghetto NOT WHITE.”

- “Trayvon Martin was a wannabe thug, a 6 ft tall bully in school who was suspended, and wasn’t the innocent teen the media made him out to be.  don’t be brainwashed by that Reverse Racist Propaganda that the news throws at you.”

- “Because Obama is a RACIST BIGOT for all to see now!!!!!”

- “If this kid was 17, where’s a recent photo?  These pictures are clearly many years old.  All violent offenders were ‘peaceful’ until they weren’t.  So far, this is all about those who thrive on promoting racism.”

- “Hispanics are valuable people they pick the berries and keep the coon population down.”

- “The Congressional Caucus is planning on showing solidarity by having its members get teardrop tattoos and L.A. Dodger jackets with a hoodie…….wont that be nice?”

- “So now this thugs family has the colored panthers on thier side.  Good choice, call the taliban and see if they will help you also!!!”

- “Timothy johson BLACK Hoodie killed a computer store owner in Lancaster CA .north of LA, Johson was caught today wearing his NIGGER hood.  shot all BLACKS,totally worthless.”

- “The media and Obama have really taken advantage of this ‘opportunity’ to set race relations back several decades.  What a sade time to be an american!”

- “The moral to the Trayvon Martin shooting:  ’If you make it a point to walk like a duck… talke like a duck… and to look like a duck…. don’t be surprised is someone concludes you are a duck… and decides to go duck hunting…’”

- “buy stock in KFC and colt 45, monkey boys parents will be spending lots of that money they will be getting there and the local meth dealers will make a haul also”

- “just keep wondering what was he doing in a gated community?”

- “Hopefully Zimmerman has started a trend that will continue.”

I read these things, and I think about how Trayvon Martin’s family can read them too.  How they watched their son go out to buy some candy for his little brother, and the next time they saw him was cold and dead and gone forever, in the morgue with his chest blown open for the crime of being black, shot because some cop-loving motherfucker saw him put his hood up in the rain and decided he was a criminal and a drug addict; and how now the name of their dead child is on the front page of every newspaper in America, and all they have to do is scroll down a few inches and read ten thousand anonymous racist cowards salivating out pure acid about how he deserved it and worse.  And I think, I should say something.  But what can I say that will make one goddamn bit of difference to them, to their grief and pain, to their dead son whose crime was his color?

The murder of Trayvon Martin:  it seems like the only thing we should be talking about.  But it seems like there is nothing we can say.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

I am a regular guy who has experienced various life events.  And as a regular guy who has experienced various life events, I will on occasion answer letters from my readers seeking advice about similar life events they may be encountering.  In a regular way.

Dear Regular Guy,

I would like to drink thirteen beers and half a bottle of cheap tequila and then involve myself in a drag-racing competition with some ethnic teens who attend my high school.  May I have your views on this matter?  Yours sincerely,

Hung Over in 1st Period Chemistry

Dear Chemist,

Do not do this.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

Should I sever my own foot with a power tool in furtherance of an insurance fraud I have concocted?  Yours truly,

Imminently Footless

Dear Foot,

No.  You should not.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

How would it be if I was to become a five-dollar whore, trading sexual favors to neighborhood lowlifes and potential serial killers and then spending the money on Air Heads candy and suchlike?  Respectfully,

I Like Nutter Butters

Dear Nut,

That would be terrible.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

What is the best kind of murder/suicide?  With all of my love,

Sister’s Gotta Go

Dear Got,

I would say there is really no ‘best’ kind of murder/suicide.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

What would you think if I had a number of children out of wedlock with the guy who cleans the pumps at my local mini-mart?  If it affects your decision one way or another, he is exactly twice my age.  Best wishes,

Just Wondering

Dear Just,

I think that would be insane.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

What is this leaking out of my ear?  Take care,

Sticky and Kind Of Sleepy

Dear Kind,

Nothing should be leaking out of your ear.  Seek medical attention.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

Should I run out onto a nearby interstate highway naked, screaming, and wildly firing a pistol into the air?  Awaiting your response,

Trailer Park

Dear Park,

Absolutely not.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

What are the proper circumstances under which a fellow should declare his romantic love for the six-year-old daughter of his neighbor?  What if it were the five-year-old son of his dentist? Your humble correspondent,

Hopelessly In Love

Dear Less,

Under no circumstances should you do either of these things.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

What is the best part of one’s body to expose repeatedly to an open flame?  Cordially,

Burning Sensation

Dear Sense,

Do not set any portion of your body on fire.

– A  Regular Guy

Dear Regular Guy,

If I am displeased with the quality of network television programming, would it be wise to take my TV and hurl it off of a freeway overpass, attempting to drive it through the windshield of an automobile passing below?  It seems like it would.  Yours in Christ,

Darn You ’2 Broke Girls’

Dear Darn,

Such a course of action would do nothing to solve your problem.

– A  Regular Guy

If you are having life events of a varied nature, and would like advice about them from a regular guy, please submit them in the comments section and I will address them as time permits.  Advice is for entertainment purposes only and it would probably be fine if you just did the opposite of what I said.  But who knows.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

That one finds, in the infant days of the 21st century — indeed, if certain overzealous interpreters of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar are to be credited, the very end of human civilization! — a widespread resistance to well-established facts about human behavior continues to surprise.  The world probably isn’t coming to an end, but if it does, the final expression on more than a few faces will be a wince at the thought that, here in the most highly developed nation in human history, many people still live according to a mindset that hasn’t changed much since the 14th century.

The subjugation of women, for example — physical, social, and intellectual — has literally been with us since the beginning of civilization, if we define that word as the widespread introduction of those two brutal blows to the gender, sedentism and agriculture.  The reason for it is equally indisputable; since the first caste of bosses was formed, they found it necessary to restrict the freedom of those who served them.  The question “Why should I do what you tell me to do?” is the oldest and most problematic one for members of the ruling class.  The justifications for the oppression of women (or any other minority, even when it is, in fact, a majority) have varied through the ages, as has its implementation, but the cause of this dreary effect has always been the same:  women must serve (first by childbirth, then by drudgesome agricultural tasks, then by less taxing but just as cheerless domestic chores, and — in the final stages of the pre-feminist society — the more degrading forms of capitalist labor), so women must be kept down.

Reactionaries and conservatives — I will try to stick to these terms even though I am specifically discussing Republicans in America, because this ignominy knows neither party nor country — like to date the latter-day decline of the human race to the 1960s.  This period of social upheaval — brought about, apparently, by Saul Alinsky, the Grateful Dead, and the sudden widespread availability of hallucinogens — is what they believe gave birth to such nightmarish bugaboos as civil rights, sass-mouth, the appearance of uncloseted homosexuals, and worst of all, feminism.  On this, as with almost everything else, they are wrong, due to their well-documented allergy to history and economics.  It was not the social chaos of the ’60s that led to the expansion of freedom which they believe has turned our world into a noisy parade of disobedience; it was, instead, the development of widespread industrialization and technological development — and its concomitant decline in the need for traditional divisions of society and organizations of labor — that led to a recognition that the time was right for freedom to be expanded.  Feminism did not change society for the worse; society changed and made way for feminism.

This was already recognized by anyone who had the sense to look into it as early as it began to occur; at this late date, with feminism as an idea being centuries old and women’s rights as a going concern dating back well over fifty years, acting as if it is an ugly new idea that can be extinguished, let alone resisted, has to be thought of as willful ignorance.  The notion that women, like men, should be allowed some degree of agency over their bodies, their time, and the direction of their lives is so established in almost every country on Earth that it is bewildering to hear it coming from Americans in the year 2012 — and doubly so when it comes from a body of conservatives who have of late passionately, if unconvincingly, attempted to define their primary motivation as the protection of freedom.

This style of conservative politics, the still-unnamed development of a sweaty, messy, decades-long coupling of right-libertarian economic absolutists and time-displaced religious activists, has managed through a combination of luck and money to dominate the public conversation since in early 1980s and show no signs of flagging.  They wrestle the body politic into submission in the most curious of ways, and are as oblivious in their losses as they are eliminationist in their victories.  Right now, for example, they have managed to turn an attempt to unseat an unpopular president during a massive economic downturn into one of the most comical electoral clusterfucks in recent memory; the leading candidate, a bland plutocrat of the sort that have won elections for the Republican Party for a century, is felt by these mutants to be so ideologically impure that they seem willing to scuttle the entire election by backing a pair of comically inept throwbacks rather than settle for the one guy who might actually win the election.

And so it is that today — at a time when it might be the understatement of the millenium to say that we have more important things to worry about — we find the conservatives deciding that the defining issue of the 2012 election should be birth control.  The idea that a man should not have to have a baby every time he fornicates is as settled as the island of Manhattan, and even women have largely been allowed to escape the notion that sex=child for the last 40 years or so.  But conservatives just hate it.  The notion that sex is strictly for childbearing within heterosexual marriage — and that everyone should both desire and be bound to that mind-bogglingly restrictive conception of human sexuality — is one of their favorites despite its utter removal from the way most human beings experience reality, right up there with the idea that you can keep teenagers from having sex by simply telling them not to, the idea that everyone in a capitalist system will behave both ethically and rationally provided that no one attempts to ensure that they do so, and the idea that the effect humans have on the environment doesn’t matter as long as you don’t believe it’s happening.

The problem for conservatives is that nobody likes this particular idea.  Women, even ones who openly vilify the concept, love birth control because it means they can engage in the universally-enjoyed practice of sexual intercourse without the not so widely embraced consequence of having a baby.  Men, of course, love birth control for exactly the same reason.  Even in the most established strongholds of Catholicism (with the possible exception of Africa, which white people seem determined to reduce to a continent-sized charnel ground if it’s the last thing they do), birth control and other forms of sexual liberation have gotten themselves a toehold they’re not likely to relinquish.  If gay marriage is allowed in Mexico City (and it is), and contraception is widely available in Ireland (and it is), what chance have these people of rolling back the clock in America?

And so it is that Rush Limbaugh, who, despite his self-definition as a rarefied form of entertainer/performance artist is and has always been the spokesperson for this curious band of moralistic libertarians, came to call a perfectly decent law school student a slut in front of the entire nation.  The Pied Piper of Petulance has taken some heat for his comments, even from a handful of the softer sort of conservative, and a surprisingly widespread pressure campaign against his advertisers has led some to suggest that he may have finally crossed a Rubicon of asininity from which it will be impossible to return.  This ignores the fact that not only has Rush proven absolutely unkillable in the past — serial fabrication, extramarital whoring, and bullying his domestic staff into enabling his pill addiction have done nothing to tarnish him — and that the vast majority of his fans and followers agree with him, with many even going as far to criticize him for offering even the flaccid apology he mustered when things got a little too heavy.

The curious thing about this approach isn’t its weird persistence into an era when it has become ludicrous.  As noted, the existence of certain types of elitist societies — even ones whose time has long past — is not merely eased by, but is absolutely dependent upon, the subjugation of women.   And, as they say in in the Navy, there’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.  So “bitch, down!” remains the clarion call for everyone who thinks that the decline of western civilization began with the First Amendment and culminated with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe.  What’s so funny about it — what’s so fucking funny — is that these people wrap up their slut-shaming and gut-punching in the fancy hatbox of happiness and the festive ribbon of freedom.  If women pretend that they think birth control is an important part of their overall health and well-being, well, it’s certainly not because contraception is real medicine, like hair loss creams and boner pills, and it’s definitely not because they should be able to decide whether or not they have a baby every time they have sex (a freedom only available to men).  It’s because, after all, they are dirty, dirty whores, and requiring an insurance plan to offer contraception as part of its coverage is not only, somehow, an affront to religious freedom (as if religious organizations, just like everyone else, do not routinely have to follow all sorts of legislation that may not coincide with their morals), but also a green light by our liberal overlords for women to slut it up all over town.

If there were any doubt about the sincerity of this hambone attempt to further the cause of gender oppression under the guise of freedom and contentment, it can easily be dispelled by reading this not atypical eructation from the flirtini-stained teeth and tongue of Pamela Geller.  It makes all the usual assertions — as always, unaccompanied by any questioning of women other than the one who made them — that women were all happier before those nasty ol’ feminist bull-daggers came along and ruined the game for everybody.  (It’s especially bizarre coming from women, of course.  Crazy Pammy condemns Fluke as a “full-fledged activist” — I know she is, but what are you? — and speaks fondly of a time when she surely would have been publicly shamed for being a loudmouthed, half-educated, drunken termagant, regardless of how much her line of noisy horseshit flattered the bosses.)  The killer yap comes in the very beginning of the piece, before Pam starts fawningly quoting herself.  After accusing Sandra Fluke of being a “pig” who lowers herself to “meat status” and teaches children to “debase themselves”, she reveals her own counter-construct of the role of women:

I explain it to young girls this way. Go into any Wal-Mart or Target. There are hundreds of black handbags for sale in bins, hung on display walls, all cheap or moderately priced, and they can’t give them away.

Now  go into Hermes. There is one black, gorgeous, impossible to get, crocodile Birkin bag. There are waiting lists for this bag. No one can get that bag. It costs a fortune and still everyone wants that bag.

Be that bag.

There you have it, ladies:  rather than be a “pig” who revels in your status as “meat” by suggesting that you be allowed to speak in favor of controlling your own reproductive choices, better than you imagine yourselves as a Hermès bag:  ludicrously overpriced, existing solely as a means of conspicuously flaunting your wealth and power, and most of all, beautifully, perfectly, eternally inanimate.  A pig, for all its filth and foulness, is at least a living thing that might behave in unexpected or even — gasp! — self-interested ways; it is thus unthinkable for students of the Bitchdowne School to respect a woman who fits such a definition.  Instead, ladies, see yourself as something motionless, brainless, pretty and pricey, with no more volition than a stone.  Be that bag.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Attention media professionals, academics, authors, popular culture enthusiasts, seekers after wisdom, and other information-needing individuals and/or organizations:  today is your lucky day!  For today is the day I , Leonard A. Pierce Jr., announce that I am available for consultation on any and all topics — at a highly reasonable fee — as a Qualified Expert!

Ermm…on what, exactly?

On everything.

Could you be a bit more precise?

I am offering my expertise to you, your organization, your institution, company, conglomerate, website, pod-cast, think tank, ruling government and/or loyal opposition, criminal enterprise, rebel group, or ‘uncategorizable’ as a Qualified Expert on all things.  I will answer all questions, decide all issues, settle all arguments, reveal all secrets, pass all judgments, and provide all advice you may require, for a fee suitable to your needs and resources.

Why you, exactly?

Because I am never wrong.

What?

You heard me.

But surely.

But surely indeed.  And yet here we both are.

What…I mean, you’re not saying you’re always right, are you?

No, I am saying I am never wrong.  The distinction is subtle but important.  However, if it furthers your trust in the Leonard Pierce, Qualified Expert experience to believe that I am always right, I am willing to settle for that interpretation of my abilities.

But what about that one time…

Yes.  Even then.

You know which time I’m talking about?

Yes.

And yet you still maintain…

Yes, even then I was right.  No one is more surprised than me.  Indeed, it was that time that convinced me that if I was not wrong under those circumstances — which seemed specifically constructed to make me wrong — then it was entirely possible, perhaps even probable, and from there a mere gavotte across the floor to inevitable, that I am never wrong.

About…

Anything.

So you’re saying that you know everything.

No, I am not saying that.  I have no more access to information than any other jobless oaf with an internet connection. I do not know everything; however, I am never wrong.  If you ask me a question, the answer I give you may not be factually correct, but neither will it be wrong.

I don’t think I fully understand this concept.

It is difficult to completely comprehend until you see it in action.

And I assume that’s going to cost me?

Yes.  But the price may range from a cocktail to several hundred million dollars.  From each according to his abilities and all that.

Who said that, smart guy?

Uh-uh, no freebies.  Hit the sidewalk, freeloader.

All right, fine.  For what sort of questions might I utilize your service?

• The true meaning of life
• How to make a proper Gibson cocktail
• The identity of the greatest athlete in human history
• The correct moral action in any given situation
• The soundtrack one should prepare for a specific activity, from a half-hour masturbation session to one’s betrothal ceremony to a ewe
• Advice to the lovelorn
• The rectitude and applicability of various permutations of foul language
• All correct opinions on art, literature, music, film, philosophy, and culture
• Presenting one’s self to society
• Ending a sentence with a proposition and why it is acceptable
• Employing the word ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ and why it is not acceptable
• Etc.

But, listen.  Surely you don’t think that you are genuinely right about everything.

I know that I am.

How?

I believe that I was created by God to be his own oracle on Earth, dispensing the truth to all who know to ask the right questions.

Come on.  You don’t even believe in God.

That’s true.

So how do you know you’re always right?

It just seems like I would be.

So assuming I credit this outrageously ridiculous claim, how might I take advantage of your alleged correctness on all possible topics?

Simply write to me via this website, leonard at ludic live dot com.  Let me know what your subject of inquiry is, in what venue you would like it answered (podcast, tele-vision program, e-mail, secret meeting of sinister cabal, etc.), and what learning the answer to your pressing question might be worth to you.  I guarantee the process will be rewarding, satisfying, and potentially life-altering, up to but not including the point at which those terms become legally actionable.  Write today!  I get not wronger every minute.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money.

All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing we have built our entire culture and values system around.  Some of these are merely amusing, such as the curious dramatic trope of writing amounts of money on a piece of paper rather than saying them out loud, just like no one has ever actually done.  Others are ham-handed attempts at workplace dominance disguised as behavioral niceties, such as the bogus stricture that one must never reveal one’s salary to one’s co-workers; money (and class, money’s social signifier) is often invoked as something not to be discussed in polite company along with religion and politics, no doubt accounting for the is-it-raining-where-you-are banality of conversation with strangers.  Lying about money is practically the national pastime of the United States; poor people lie about it to avoid shame and disgrace, rich people lie about it to deflect envy and outrage, and the hilariously named financial services industry lies about it to make more of it.

Part of the problem, of course, lies in definitions.  What we talk about when we talk about money depends on who we’re talking to, and who might be listening.  The late Neil Postman once astutely observed that we are used to thinking of “big words” as being complicated and daunting, when in fact the opposite is true:  polysyllabic mouthfuls like ‘participle’ or ‘centrifugal’ have very specific fixed meanings upon which everyone agrees, while defining seemingly simple words like ‘true’ or ‘good’ leads us into an inescapable rat’s nest of contentious debate.  So, too, is the case whenever we discuss dollars and cents:  the meaning of simple terms becomes frustratingly thorny, often by design.

Take, for example, the notion of ‘debt’.  We have been trained to think of the national debt as resembling a household debt; indeed, there is a popular internet meme, endlessly re-posted by partisans of both the left and the right, that makes this comparison explicit.  But wiser heads have reminded us that in fact, the national debt is nothing at all like a family budget, and to conceive it as such is to make a profound error in understanding our national financial priorities.  The national debt is more an obligation of which we must be mindful than an actual number with the kind of meaning we affix to overdrafts on our checking accounts.  ’Earn’ is another word that’s hard to pin down; conservatives often claim that people receiving social services did not ‘earn’ that money, even if they’ve fallen on hard times after decades of paying money into the system.  But those same conservatives also support things like the extension of intellectual property laws, and the repeal of inheritance taxes; it’s hard to conceive of a person who did less to ‘earn’ their riches than one who was just born into a wealthy family.

Budgets, too, are something we are encouraged to think of in very different ways depending on who is asking us to think about them and to what end.  The financial conservatives, when they are in the mood for belt-tightening, always sell austerity measures in terms of budget expenditures that we as a nation can simply no longer afford.  This rarely applies to military and security spending, however; the vast quantities of cash we shovel into national defense is almost always justified with the claim that they are used to protect our freedoms.  Another prickly word, though, that ‘freedom’:  some folks would argue that there’s little use in protecting one’s freedom when one has no money and the only freedom offered is the freedom to starve.  Even that strain of ultra-conservative fiscal hawk that will allow for cuts to the military budget will not touch such secretive — and staggeringly expensive — allowances as the national security budget and the Pentagon’s so-called ‘black budget’, the literally uncountable billions that go to projects, almost all developed by private industry, the results of which we will never know and the details of which we are not allowed to ask.  Few households could function if one of their members were allowed to set aside gigantic piles of money for secret projects about which no one was ever allowed to inquire.  And, too, any poor family will tell you that the greatest expenditures go towards events that cannot be predicted, and, therefore, cannot be budgeted:  health crises, car repairs, natural disasters, and the like.  Our government, conversely, has begun to to place in the realm of the unbudgeted voluntary boondoggles like the Iraq War, which is best visualized as a huge bonfire into which we continually threw money every single minute for eight years.

Speaking of visualizations, the amounts of money we spend on this or that item are often presented in terms of a stack of bills that reaches to (insert distant object here), as if people were having trouble with the physical size of the money rather than its value.  ”Rich” is another one of those short words that is almost impossible to define, except insofar as almost everyone, rich or poor, defines it as “someone who has more money than I do”; and so the question of how much money constitutes a lot of money becomes a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Two such disparate characters as Sam Spade and Casper Gutman were once able to agree that a million dollars is a lot of dough, but nowadays, all we hear is how a million dollars isn’t what it used to be.  Loretta Lynn once sang about how her father raised eight kids on miner’s pay (which, for our younger readers, is approximately jack shit thousand dollars per year, adjusted for inflation), and managed to sound pretty cheerful about it; today, there are entire websites dedicated to the morose bitching of people trying to raise one kid on banker’s pay.  So, whenever people talk about money — especially the kind of money that the owners of our country tend to have — I find this to be a useful illustration.

Ever since that glorious day in August of 1927 when the nation’s millionaires officially ceded control of America over to the nation’s billionaires, the G.O.P. has been the party of the very, very rich.  The party as currently constituted may not agree on much, but they do agree on this:  millionaires pay far too much in taxes, and billionaires pay far, far, far too much in taxes.  Official Republican godhead Ronald Reagan literally defined the party as the one that “wants to see an America in which people can still get rich“; more recent developments have subtly altered this to “still get richer”, and later to “still stay richer”.  If the G.O.P. of Grover Norquist, of the Tea Party and the Anti-Tax Pledge, can be said to stand for anything, it is that billionaires should be all but exempt from taxation, and that they should be free to do anything they like with their money short of being asked to help people who haven’t got any.

To appreciate what this really means, it seems necessary to get a grip on exactly how much a billion dollars (or, if you prefer, a thousand ‘doesn’t-go-as-far-as-it-used-to’ million dollars) really is.  Let us say that you are the freshly scrubbed recipient of one billion dollars, which you have gotten through a clever combination of sound investments and emerging from a vagina into which a rich man once shot a load of sperm.  You have already paid your 14% tax rate on the money, just like your chauffer and your maid except a lot less, and you have decided:  ”You know what?  Fuck my stupid kids.  Fuck saving for the future.  Fuck investments and wise financial discipline.  I’m going to take all this money, convert it into cash, and start spending it like the Rapture is coming.  I’m not even going to put a single goddamn dime of it into a shitty low-yield savings account at some swindling mega-bank.  I’m just gonna start pissing it away, to the tune of $25,000 every single day, until the money runs out.”  That’ll show whoever!

So starting on January 1st of the new year, you pay some college intern to take your money and put it into stacks of 250 $100 bills.  They’re too big to put in your pocket so you take the first stack and you pay Shoshanna Lonstein to design you a special money hat.  And you set out on your mission to piss away the rest of the billion dollars, 25 grand at a time.  At first, it’s easy.  You pay off your student loans.  You buy a couple of giant houses, a couple of giant cars, a couple of giant bags of cocaine.  You take a trip to Europe.  You hire a homeless guy to break a bottle against his face.  But then you start to notice:  you’ve already bought yourself every possible material comfort you have ever imagined, and it’s not even April.  That’s when you decide to sit down and do the math: starting with a billion dollars, and spending $25,000 every single day — an amount of money that over 70 million American adults do not make in an entire year — it will take you over 109 years to spend it all.  If you are old enough to read these words, it is basically impossible that, following this course of action, you would live long enough to do anything but leave your children multiple millions of dollars.

Now, of course, not every big Republican donor has a billion dollars.  Many have far more than that.  Swift Boat funder T. Boone Pickens is worth triple that amount; Amway guru Rich DeVos is worth over $4 billion; Christian arch-conservative Philip Anschutz   has about $6.4 billion to his name; and FOX News prince of darkness Rupert Murdoch clocks in at well over $7 billion.  The shadowy Koch Brothers spend huge chunks of cash funding conservative causes and disseminating right-wing propaganda; lucky for them they have $50 billion in cash-chunks.  (Which means that they could spend $1,250,000 a day for over a century without running out.)  And at the very top, the Walton family of exurban retail banditry is worth a combined total of $90 billion, meaning that they could spend our arbitrary $25,000 a day retroactively going back to the beginning of human civilization and still have tens of millions left over.

These people all do two things with their time:  make more money, and lobby to ensure that they have to pay as little money as possible into the system that allowed them to make all the money they already have.  They have so much that I have to invent perverse illustrations like the one above just to render the amount of cash they have to hand fathomable to the human mind, and yet their primary occupations are increasing that amount and ensuring that virtually none of it goes to helping people who have less by orders of magnitude.  It’s just something to think about the next time someone mentions austerity measures, or assures you that the country simply hasn’t got the money to spend on a social safety net any more.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

Rather than do the predictable, not to mention timely and sensible, thing and write about the season première of Justified, I thought I’d take a different approach.  Raylan Givens, the quick-triggered U.S. marshal who is the protagonist of the show, is played by Timothy Olyphant, who also played Seth Bullock, the quick-tempered sheriff of Deadwood in the HBO series of the same name, and with Justified now entering its third season — the same length of time Deadwood was on the air — it’s become easier to see how the two characters both reflect and oppose one another.

There are, of course, pretty facile surface similarities beyond the man playing the role.  The cowboy hat, the easy lure of the hand to the gun, and the constant familiarity with violence, though, could be assigned to a hundred characters of the Wild West (and the New South) since The Wild Bunch placed its permanent twist on the moral codes of the lawman and the outlaw.  To really see their similarities and their difference, you have to go beyond the men to their surroundings and circumstances, starting with the places they ply their trades.  Deadwood‘s Seth Bullock was a man who sincerely believed in the weight and authority of the law, in the load-bearing qualities of its letter as well as the moral force of its meaning; the first time we see him, indeed, he single-handedly carries out the execution by hanging of a horse thief rather than let a drunken mob handle the task.  It is this belief in structure and process that is thrown into the environment of the Deadwood camp, a place marked by, if not complete anarchy, at least a resistance to bureaucracy that saturates its very timbers.  Bullock wants to make a life for himself out of the rags and scraps of his dead brother’s family, a desire driven — as we will see — not out of his personal desire, but out of a sense of honor and propriety.  He is a man utterly dedicated not only to doing what is right, but doing it the right way, and Deadwood is a place where people are perversely uninterested in the right way.  (Witness Tom Nuttall’s reaction to being asked to take basic fire prevention measures as a harbinger of the Apocalypse.)  The camp is a place well-suited to Bullock’s desire to make himself a new man by stepping into a dead man’s shoes, and in Sol Star he has a partner who can make him rich, but he couldn’t be more ill-suited to the lawless environment.

While Deadwood is a microcosm of the development of a larger society, though, Raylan Givens’ Harlan County is simply the modern world made small.  The real Harlan is a small town struggling to drag its 19th-century rural-industrial spirit into a 21st-century technocratic reality; the TV Harlan is whatever the writers want it to be, with Rastafarian ministers, smooth-talking hustlers, real estate swindlers and displaced urban gangstas among its backwoods meth-heads and rebel-flaggers.  It’s a Harlan that has moved into the modern world with far less trouble than Deadwood experienced in the process, and while violence is still endemic, it is no longer taken for granted.   Wu’s pigs are nowhere to be found, and Raylan must answer for every killing, no matter how cozily it fits the description of the show’s title.  He is a man who devotedly loves the spirit of justice, because it makes bad men answer for their wrongs, but he is far less concerned with the legal niceties his work entails, largely restricting himself to making sure his ass is covered if he has to put a bullet through someone’s heart.  This is why his supervisor calls him “a good lawman but a bad marshal” — he wants to do the right thing, but he finds himself incapable of caring too much if he does it the right way.

It is in their relationships with their peers and their foes that the differences between Bullock and Givens most reveal themselves.  It’s evident from the first time we see Seth Bullock that he will eventually wear a lawman’s star, and each time he tries to resist, it causes him almost tangible pain, as if he is standing against the tide.  When he eventually pins it on, he does so with a fierce sense of resistance — not to assuming the role of authority, which he was clearly born to, but because of the hand offering it.  His devotion is to law itself, and becoming a lawman at the behest of Al Swearengen seems like an insult too grave to be borne at first.  Bullock is governed by a rectitude and determination that is almost frightening in its intensity, and his all-too-obvious love of violence doesn’t speak to any kind of sociopathy, but to a man who simply isn’t bright enough to solve a lot of problems on his own and resorts to force because he can’t think of anything else.  (This fierceness is expressed by Oyphant in a way that, at first, makes him seem like a rather limited actor; his screwed-up mad-face looks like his only go-to move until you’ve seen his disarming cool in Justified.)

Givens, though, really doesn’t care that much about the job, and if anything, he’s driven by inertia, if such a contradiction is possible.  He’s a lawman because he has a good heart but lacks the skill to do much besides kill people.  He drifts even within the limited paths available to a U.S. marshal, serving wherever he’s sent and contemplating a move out of the field to please his ex-wife.  If Al Swearengen is manipulating Bullock into the sheriff’s role, forcing him to do good despite himself, Art Mullen is keeping Givens in Kentucky as a sort of existential punishment for both of them — Raylan for failing to show any ambition or aptitude, and Art for failing to make him into a good marshal but hoping he’ll at least remain a good man.  Bullock doesn’t particularly want to take on his late brother’s wife and child, but having judged it his duty to do so, he builds them an impressive house on a choice plot of land in a remarkably short period of time; getting his ex-wife back is about the only thing Givens wants, but he can’t even be bothered to move out of a hotel room.  It’s become a common observation that Boyd Crowder is Raylan Givens’ opposite number — the man who he might have become if he’d never made it out of Harlan; the truth may be more dismaying.  If he’d stayed in Harlan, Raylan might have become Bowman Crowder, or Devil, or some other nameless and directionless thug with no skills past the barrel of a gun.

Even in their enemies, Raylan Givens and Seth Bullock are shaped to opposite ends.  Though some of this can be attributed to the nature of the shows in which they appeared, Bullock’s enemies tend to be forces greater than he is capable of addressing, either mentally or physically.  The pathetic wreck Jack McCall poses him no threat; all he fears there is his own sense of right — and its powerful draw towards the end of putting McCall down like a dog — getting in the way of his adherence to the law.  It is when he encounters men beyond the reach of both his fists and his understanding that he is truly given to rage, which always results in blood he didn’t intend to spill:  Otis Russell has him over a barrel and he knows it, and Bullock hands out a brutal but pointless beating before going to the cavalry and asking them to protect Alma’s father against his own short-sightedness.  And he’s flustered by George Hurst at every turn:  the man who truly understands the nature of power — and who holds in contempt both justice and law, the only constants in Bullock’s life — constantly stymies him.  Givens, on the other hand, only seems energized and full of what we might term a Bullockian sensibility in the pilot, when he faces down the drug boss Buckley.  The rest of his opponents tend to be beneath him:  unambitious lowlifes, pushers, and grifters who think they’re smarter than the system, and the occasional Mags Bennett, who, like Raylan himself, can’t tear herself away from the enervating minutiae of the old Harlan enough to realize her true potential and chokes on her own poison, saving him the trouble of another AUSA interview.  The only figure who poses a challenge to Raylan is Boyd Crowder, who may be well on his way to becoming his own personal Al Swearengen.

Deadwood made Seth Bullock a flawed and tragic figure from the get-go, and let both his admirable qualities and his frustrating shortcomings spool themselves out regularly from episode to episode, and even from moment to moment.  Justified had more of an interest in the very beginning in establishing Raylan Givens as a hero, if a flawed one, but events late in the second season, usually filtered through the underappreciated Art Mullen, made it clear that the flaws hinted at in the first season run deeper and darker than we’d come to believe.  While Justified may not deliver the majestic highs of Deadwood, it also won’t likely end on a note of such cruel suspension, and so far at least, it’s given a deceptively good actor in the person of Timothy Olyphant a great deal of stretching room to take a character that could have been played like a descendent of Seth Bullock’s and turn him into the branch of a whole different family tree.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.