The Unplanned Misadventures of MirMir and Bess

A new blog! But it's not here!

2011-10-31T11:19:00.001-04:00

I have a brand new blog, over at http://anachro-anarcho.blogspot.com, where I talk about great political activists of the 19th century. I hope you will check it out.

Announcement

2011-10-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

Hey guys, I have a new blog. It's over here: http://anachro-anarcho.blogspot.com/

It's my Steampunk Emma Goldman blog, and it provides a space for me to talk about amazing political activists of the 19th century. Enjoy!

A Recent Adventure: In Which Hurricane Irene Causes Me To Visit the Sheboygan Jail

2011-09-07T12:57:00.005-04:00

It is a gray, horrible day, and I don't want to do anything. Also I haven't blogged in a long, long time. So I drank a bunch of tea and wrote about this thing that happened to me recently.

So, no shit, there I was, rural Wisconsin. That's right, the same place in rural Wisconsin where Bess and I had the encounter with the angry drunk bigot and the non-existant bears, and where we had the encounter with the snowbank and a lot of embarrasment. I was there with my family this time, and all was well. Well, I say all was well. All was well in Wisconsin. In New York, where I currently actually live, all was decidedly unwell, because there was, I don't know if you heard, a huge fuck-off hurricane called Irene coming. I was scheduled to fly home on the day that Irene was supposed to hit the city mega-bad. At this point I realized I had two choices. I could stay where I was, in rural Wisconsin, and go back to New York whenever the city settled down, or I could try as hard as I could to get in BEFORE the hurricane hit, and thus avoid both being stuck in Wisconsin for an indefinite period of time, and also being called a pussy by all my friends for being in the Midwest while they were going through a hurricane-apocalypse.

So I called the airline, spent four hours on hold, rescheduled my flight to the LAST FLIGHT TO NEW YORK which would be out of O'Hare, and which would happen in about twelve hours. Now, how to get from Ruralsville, Wisconsin to O'Hare? There weren't a lot of options. My dad drove me to Green Bay, where I rented a car, and proceeded to drive Chicago-wards. I was caffeinating and eating sour gummy worms, since I knew I was going to end up driving well into the night, and I find that coffee, Diet Coke, and sour gummy worms are pretty much all I need to stay up late. Well, that and good music. I was unfortunately unable to find good music, as at least two thirds of the radio stations in rural Wisconsin turned out to be Christian, and even when they stopped talking about God n' Stuff, they played the Worst. Music. Ever. Seriously, I am aware that some Christian music can be really good (that Handel guy had something going for him, I thought) but Christian radio stations are the worst. Anyway, finally while I was circling the radio dial desperately listening for something that didn't suck (for some reason, all I wanted to listen to by then was Bob Dylan. You ever get like that? I would've given a year of my life for a radio station that was just willing to play Blood on the Tracks on loop) when finally I heard the opening strains of American Pie, and decided fuck it, this is as close as I'm going to get. Unfortunately, that was the last half-way decent song that 60s and 70s radio station played for the next hour. I listened to Lean on Me. I LISTENED TO LEAN ON ME. God, that song is annoying. I nearly turned back to the Christian stations.

Anyway.

The road trip was going pretty much like that when I got a call from a friend saying "hope you're not driving hell-bent across rural Wisconsin, because they just canceled all the flights into anywhere near New York, as of right now." I was thwarted. And, as it turned out when I took a look at the nearest road sign, I was thwarted in Sheboygan.

Thwarted in Sheboygan is the name of my rock band.

Anyway, it was around midnight. No point going on to Chicago, and no point going back to Green Bay, as the car rental place would be too closed to let me return the car, and oh yeah, no way was my dad driving down from Ruralsville to get me from Green Bay at that time of night, so I decided to just stay the night in Sheboygan. I found a motel at the center of town, and was mildly perturbed by the sheer number of police I saw out. Seriously, I passed about ten police cars, all around the center of Sheboygan. Was crime so rife in this sleepy little Midwestern town, I wondered? Whatever. I booked a room in the motel, and promptly realized that what with the coffee, Diet Coke, and gummy worms, there was no way I was going to get to sleep any time soon. So I walked out of the motel, which was conventiently situated right on the Sheboygan town square (Sheboygan has a town square) and walked into the first bar I saw.

It turned out to be a strip club. I walked back out.

The second place, though, turned out to be a nice little localish bar with about ten micro-brews on tap. Sweet, I thought, and sat down at the bar. At this point I began to rock the New-Yorker-Stuck-In-A-Small-Town stereotype so hard it was embarrasing. If this had been a movie, I would've ended up married to a farmer and learning the value of slowing down and taking life as it comes. But then, I also probably would've been an ad executive or a high-powered lawyer (what the hell is a high-powered lawyer? Is that a special kind of lawyer, or does it just denote the fact that they are very important?) or something. But I was rocking the stereotype in that 1) I was weaaring a black dress, in a place where no one else was wearing black, or dresses. 2) I have purple hair. That's not really a thing in Sheboygan, I soon learned. 3) I tipped a dollar on my drink. That's also not a thing in Sheboygan.

In fact, it was so not a thing that the bartender's eyes got all big and he asked me where I was from. I told him, and insisted on tipping. I told him it was the custom among my people. I don't know what I meant by that, but he seemed happy with it, and he called over a regular to come and talk to this crazy chick from New York, which was cool. My backup plan had been to read Clash of Kings on my Kindle, but I ended up talking to the regular instead. He was a professional golf caddy. Apparently golf is big in Sheboygan.

An hour or so passed like that. The bartender decided my third drink was on him, and had just poured it when he suddenly came over and announced that, shit, the bar was closing.

The regular and I (by then the only two people in there) were puzzled. It was 1:30 am, hardly the time for a mandatory bar-closing time. But no, the bartender explained as he locked up. He had to close because he had to go. And he had to go because his girlfriend was in jail, and he had to go get her.

The regular seemed not at all surprised or perturbed. "I'll drive you," he volunteered. Then he turned to me. "You want to come?" he asked.

Have any of you met me? If so, you know what I said. Hell YES I wanted to go.

So that's how I ended up riding shotgun to the Sheboygan jail.

Riding Shotgun to the Sheboygan Jail is the name of my rockband's first album. Or my 700 page introspective novel. I'm not sure yet.

Anyway, we found the jail, which was actually kind of hard. Eventually we located it by looking for the building with the most flags. Once there we found Bartender's Girlfriend, who was standing around eating an apple as though that apple had insulted her mother. She was going seriuosly vindictive on this apple; just ripping chunk after chunk out of it with her teeth. Turns out, you see, that she had been arrested on marijuana charges. That apple had been the device she and her friend had been about to smoke out of. Once released, the cops had given her her apple back, and she had decided, with the flawless logic of one who has just been Fucked by the System that fuck you, the Man, she was going to eat the HELL out of this weed-apple.

She got in the car, was introduced to me (if she thought it was weird that her boyfriend and some guy from his bar, and also this girl she didn't know had just arrived to pick her up from jail, she didn't mention it) and told us the rest of her story. She had takent the heat for her friend, who was a school teacher. Quite noble and self-sacrificing of her, we all thought, so we told her what a great person she was, how little of a deal getting arrested one time on a minor drug misdeameanor charge is, and drove back to the bar, where the bartender let us in through the back and poured out more drinks so we could toast to his girlfriend being not in jail anymore. They were all very cool people, as it turned out, and I didn't end up learning any lessons or marrying any farmers.

At the end of the night, the regular walked me back to my motel in a most gentlemanly fashion. And that is the story of how Irene resulted in me visiting the Sheboygan jail.

Steampunk, Nostalgia, and Why I Don't Think They Mix

2011-05-16T10:48:00.003-04:00

"I have no patience for nostalgia. You know, people say 'two dollars for a Mars bar! Why, I remember when-' What? You remember what? Fucking slavery, shut up." -Dylan Moran

A lot of people describe steampunk as a "nostalgic" movement. This, as you will already know if you've read the title of this piece, strikes me as stupid. I've actually heard the nostalgia thing more from people outside of steampunk trying to describe or understand the movement, but I've definitely heard it from a few actual steampunks as well, so this article will be about refuting the idea that steampunk is, or should be, nostalgic, both for outsiders trying to figure out steampunk, and for steampunks who may not be thinking things through.

Presumably, people figure steampunk is nostalgic because of the roots it has in the past; it does, after all, generally draw from a 19th century source, and the aesthetic definitely has a lot of 19th century influence. They say, and at least a few steampunks I've heard talk agree, that there is, in steampunk, a fundamental yearning for the values of the 19th century. You'll hear people talk about things like "simplicity" and "honor," whatever the crap those are supposed to mean.

But is historical awareness the same as nostalgia? I would answer that question with a resounding, roof-shaking "no." I personally feel that "nostalgia," in relation to an historical time period, can be one of the most poisonous concepts possible, dependent as it so often is on selective memory, historical whitewashing, revisionism, and a privileged view of the past.

The fact is, though, that both in and out of steampunk I do occasionally come across people who say things like "I was born in the wrong era!" or "I should've been born in the (insert year here)." Sometimes , I'm firmly of the opinion that such people are talking straight out of their asses, like when they say it at a 1940s vintage dance party. I mean, yeah, the 40s fashion, music and dancing is great, and I sure do enjoy a quaint, old fashioned cocktail, but...uh, I am very, very, very glad I wasn't alive in the 1940s. You're not? I tend to just assume that people who say such things in that context just aren't thinking, and I don't even bother to argue the point.

When it comes up in steampunk, though, people seem a little more committed to the era than they do at "vintage" events; they'll often have personas and costumes that they've put a lot of thought and effort into, which forces me to give their supposed longing for the past a little more credence. So when steampunks talk about nostalgia, I listen. And I come to a logical conclusion, which is this: anyone claiming nostalgia for the 19th century is a white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper-class Christian male. One who is naturally immune to cholera.

Are there things about the 19th century that are fun? Of course there are! But that doesn't mean that it was an inherently "good" era, or an era preferable to the one in which we now live. Here's an example from outside of steampunk that I think illustrates the point: I myself am a fervent 19th century sailing enthusiast; I love working on tall ships of that era. But I would certainly not describe myself as nostalgic for the tall ships of the 19th century. After all, one of the ships I worked on was a re-creation of a ship you may have heard of; the Amistad. Let that sink in, and try to reconcile it with the idea of being nostalgic for the age of sail.

Do I love the feel of a wooden deck pitching and rolling under my feet, do I love skylarking in the rigging of a topsail schooner out at sea while the sun goes down, do I love bonding with a crew while we work and live together? Yes, or I wouldn't do it for the very little pay most tall ships offer. Do I believe in the education program that Amistad America has in place to inform people about the slave trade, and the Amistad uprising? Yes, totally. But, uh, do I wish I had been on the actual Amistad when she made her voyage, the one that ultimately took her from Cuba to New Haven, and put her in the history books and Steven Spielberg films forever? No, not even a little bit. Are you crazy? It's a goddamn horror story. A horror story that must not be forgotten, one that must be told, remembered, and understood, but not something any sane person would be nostalgic for. Working on the Amistad was about appreciating the ship itself, preserving the arts and traditions that go along with working a ship like that, and about remembering and teaching the public about what took place aboard the original. Awareness of the past demands both, and I think that, ultimately, is the difference between enthusiasm for history, and nostalgia.

I think what it's important to remember about steampunk is that almost any aspect of 19th century history, particularly those aspects of the British Empire, or the United States that tend to get romanticized, have a lot in common with the Amistad. A beautiful setting, perhaps. A fascinating, wonderful old form of technology. And, underlying it all, the pain and suffering of an oppressed people. Properly telling the story involves telling their story as much as it does focusing on what people might love about the era; if the modern day Amistad sailed around talking about daily life on a 19th century Cuban coastal trading vessel (which is what the ship was prior to 1841) with no mention of anything else, that would be doing a massive disservice to history, and be incredibly disrespectful to the people who were taken aboard the ship as slaves. It'd be a hell of a lot easier to be nostalgic about, but it would be a lie.

I don't think I should have to list here the various oppressive, horrible things about the 19th century. That's not really the point of this post; anyone even vaguely acquainted with the history of the 19th century already knows that some awful, awful things happened, many of them things whose effects the world still lives with today (slavery, imperialism, the oppression of women, etc). My point is that these are things that should not be ignored so that we can enjoy our nostalgia in peace and good conscience, they are things that should be remembered, explored, deconstructed, and understood. Playing with the past is a great way to do all that, and steampunk, with its openness to alternate histories and willingness to both celebrate and condemn historical figures and actions, as appropriate, offers a unique tool.

Those who would aim for nostalgia should think hard about what their idealization of history does. It ignores the crimes of the past, which is not only disrespectful to the memory of those who suffered and died as a result of 19th century imperialism and oppression, but it tells their modern day descendants that you feel they do not matter. Celebrate the British Empire while ignoring what it did on the Indian subcontinent, and you tell any Indian or Pakistani person who wishes to get into steampunk that this is a genre and a subculture that is willing to ignore them, that affords them no more respect than the British did their ancestors. Romanticize American westward expansion without acknowledging the genocide that was committed in the process, and you tell Native Americans that their culture, and their history can be forgotten in service of your preferred story. Idealize the morality of the Victorian age, and you tell women, and LGBT people that their rights and humanity are so unimportant that you are willing to ignore what life would have been like for them under the system you think of as "the good old days."

People who are into nostalgia will sometimes accuse those who try to get them to reign it in of being killjoys. I believe the term on the interwebs is "harshing the squee." I do not wish to harsh anyone's squee. For those who find their squee harshed by awareness of the full, complicated history on which they draw, think how any group marginalized by your willful blindness to their perspective must feel. Your squee is not the only squee that matters, and your nostalgia might be fun for you, but it lasts only as long as you refuse to examine it, and as long as it lasts, you are limiting the scope of people who can enjoy steampunk, and limiting the usefulness of steampunk as a way to explore history.

(And here's the part where I do a shameless piece of self-promotion. I'm organizing a pro-labor flash mob and rally at the Steampunk World's Fair this year. The idea here is that our understanding of the past can help us make the future better, and that recognizing the oppression of the worker that came with the Industrial Revolution, and carrying forward the energy of the labor movement that came out of that oppression can help us as we continue to fight for rights in the modern day. If you're coming to the SPWF, and you appreciate all that unions have done to make life livable, you should absolutely be coming to these:

The flash mob: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=140376736032332

The rally: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=123821261029999 )

MirMir Has A Story on the Internet

2011-04-26T15:56:00.002-04:00

Yes, that's right, everyone! A while back I wrote a story, and recently it appeared on Yesteryear Fiction. It was serialized in nine parts, the first of which you can find here.

Just work your way forward from there, if you feel so inclined. Hope you enjoy! The story is called What You Are I Was.

Help Me, Blog Readers! You're My Only Hope.

2011-01-03T10:45:00.004-05:00

I have found myself having a very awkward conversation, more than once, and found I do not know what to say. I figured that since everyone who reads this blog is intelligent, witty, and generally fantastic, I would put this problem to all of you.

I meet someone. They might be male, or female, but they are always heterosexual. Somehow, early on in conversation, the fact that I am gay comes up. There are a number of reasons that might happen; if I'm talking to a guy and he seems to be hitting on me, chances are I'll bring it up just so that if I have to announce it later, it won't seem like I'm lying as a way of brushing him off. Sometimes it comes up because I'm in a group with my friends, and one of them mentions it in passing, or makes a joke about it. Or brings it up for some other reason. (There was one truly great moment where a shipmate of mine was concerned that a very skeevy, very drunk guy was paying undue attention to me, so he casually said something like "MirMir, can I borrow your pocket knife? Thanks. See, she has one of those because she carries tools around, because she's always prepared, and because she's a lesbian. A gay lesbian. A gay lesbian who will not sleep with you, no matter what, so back off, or I will hit you." It was pretty hilariously unsubtle. And just as hilariously ineffective at making the guy lose interest, but I'm getting to that). And sometimes I just happen to bring it up. It comes up.

Then my brand new acquaintance goes "oh, really?" and asks an unbelievably invasive question. I have gotten, from people I have just met, people whose last names I do not know, people with whom I have had perhaps a few minutes of prior conversation, all of the following questions:

"How did you first know you were a lesbian?"
"Have you ever tried sex with a guy?"
"Don't you ever want cock?"
"When did you first start sleeping with girls?"
"Have you always been a lesbian?"
"Do you use strap-ons? Do you like using them, or having them used on you?"
"So...what do lesbians DO in bed, anyway?"
"What do you like about women as opposed to men? Is it, like, a feminist thing?"
And my favorite, most absurd one EVER (and phrased exactly like this, I couldn't make this up) "Do lesbians enjoy butt play?"

I'm not shy or introverted or a prude, or anything of the kind, but I feel weird having complete strangers ask me questions about my sexual preferences, and about when I lost my virginity, within the first few minutes of our acquaintance. Who DOES that? When was the last time you met someone, and it occurred to you within five minutes of conversation to ask them about when they lost their virginity?

Now, I get what's sometimes happening when the asker is a straight guy. He wants to hear a sexy story about sexy lesbians doing sexy things. And when it's a straight woman, I think a lot of the time they are simply curious. Maybe that's the case with some of the straight men, too. I understand that the idea of homosexuality is mysterious and strange to some people, and I understand that they want to learn more about what makes gay people tick. I even accept the idea that this is a good thing, generally. But the way for people who are unfamiliar with the concept of homosexuality to get more used to the idea, and to understand it better, is for them to see homosexuals as people, not as walking encyclopedias of gayness. They need to afford homosexuals the same respect they afford to heterosexuals, and assume that casual conversation is not the venue for trying to get a full sexual history. They need to not assume that because someone has something that makes them different, that they are automatically subject to the scrutiny and questions of any random stranger.

Some of the questions aren't just rude, they're downright invasive. "Have you ever had sex with a man?" That's not necessarily a safe or innocuous question considering the percentage of queer women who have been raped. And that's just one extreme example of why that's a terrible question to ask a stranger. On the other hand, like I said, I think the intention is not bad; there's just some thoughtlessness happening.

So that brings me to what I need from all of you. You see, I have been trying really hard to think of what to say in response to people who ask me these questions. Saying "I'm not comfortable discussing that with you right now," makes me the rude one, and moreover, it increases the weird mystique that these people already have about the whole idea of homosexuality. Turning the questions back on them, and asking the same questions about their sexual history is a good idea, but I feel like they won't get what I'm doing with that, and will misinterpret it as a desire to stay on the subject. I need a reply that will:

1) Make it clear that their question is not really appropriate, without making me seem like a prude.
2) Make it clear that I am not offended by their question, but that I prefer not to talk about this right now.
3) Be funny.

Or is turning the questions around on them a good option? I feel like it will be misunderstood. Your thoughts in the comments, please? You're all brilliant, witty, etc. Pass this on to the wittiest person you know, see what they come up with. I need some help here.

The Boycott of Thor: Why it's the Funniest Thing White Supremacists Have Done Lately

2010-12-21T17:07:00.014-05:00

You may have heard this already, but some white supremacists have decided to boycott the movie Thor, the latest film from the Marvel universe. They are doing this because one of the characters in the movie, namely Heimdall, a Norse god you probably haven't heard of (I hadn't) is going to be played by a black man, namely Idris Elba, an actor you probably have heard of, because he's been in some really good stuff.

So what are a few brain-dead white-supremacists doing about this outrage?Like I said, they 're boycotting the movie. They're doing this as though they really think that the marketing minds at Marvel Studios were sitting up late into the night going "oh god! I hope we get the white supremacist demographic! What if the racists don't like our stuff? I don't mean the regular, borderline racists, the kind who call anyone darker than themselves 'Mexicans' or even the outright racists who won't admit they are, but still insist that there's something 'un-American' about President Obama. I mean the real, hard-core, cold-blooded evil neo-Nazi douchebags who use racial slurs you thought everyone had forgotten existed in the early eighteen-seventies. Will THOSE GUYS want to see our movie? I wouldn't know what to do with myself if they didn't." Yeah, white-supremacists. You show those Marvel guys. Show them you don't want to see their stupid movie. I'm sure they'll be up all night crying that they lost about fifty ticket sales, but gained a reputation for being a film reviled by total ass-hats.

What's been really great about the reaction to the boycott is the way every article condemns the boycott, but then comes up with a few more good reasons that the white-supremacists should be boycotting anyway. They're all like "well fine, don't see this movie because of Idris Elba! Assholes. But you know, you should've already been not-seeing it because of Natalie Portman." You know you're in an unpopular demographic when you decide to boycott something, and everyone encourages you to stay the fuck away from it, and actively comes up with reasons why you should.

My first reaction to this whole thing was basically "awesome! I love it when people I don't like don't like things that I like!" I'd have been way more upset if white supremacists had decided that Thor was going to be their big movie of 2011. I would have found that kind of upsetting. I was prepared to let my reaction go at that, because I love Marvel comics and hate white supremacists, so anything that would keep the latter away from the former just seemed great to me, but then my curiosity got the better of me, and I actually checked out the website boycott-thor.com (they had to put the dash in there because boycottthor involves three T's in a row, and that just looks silly. Three K's in a row probably look just fine to these guys, but that's neither here nor there now, is it?)

And I'm glad I did check out the website, because it did a few very difficult things.

1) It made me laugh at white supremacists. Admittedly, that's not really so hard to do at all, so I lied about it being difficult. If you ignore their stomach-churning vileness, they're actually kind of funny, when they're not being violent.
2) It made me like Stan Lee more. Stan Lee is not only the grand-daddy of contemporary graphic novels (he basically came up with the idea of the complex, human superhero, whose humanity was more important than his or her powers) but he's a ton of fun in interviews, takes an obviously great delight in his fans, in the cameos he does in his movies, and in attending cons, and is never, never rude to people who ask for autographs, which for a guy like him is kind of amazing. He is grandfatherly and charming. He says "Excelsior!" all the time. Yet this website about what a dick white supremacists think he is made me like him more. MORE THAN I ALREADY DID.
3) It got me really excited about Thor, which up until now had, for me personally, been the least-anticipated superhero movie since the Fantastic Four.

So this website. The homepage is just a bunch of linked articles, with headlines like "Marvel has a history of publishing extremist "Black Power" comics" and whining on and on about how it's ok for people to talk about black pride, but people who talk about white pride are labeled as assholes. If you've ever been on a white supremacist website (what? I can't look away! They're like car accidents. Car accidents full of absolute morons. Car accidents full of violent, hateful absolute morons who think I control the world economy and probably wish me harm.) you've seen this sort of thing before, so I'll skip it and concentrate on the central point of the website. Actually, there are two central points.

1) Idris Elba as Heimdall = Not Okay, Man.
2) Marvel itself is kind of suspect too, now you that you come to mention it.

They have an open letter to Marvel Studios, which basically says, if I may sum up, "The great god Heimdall, who is very important to Nordic or possibly Germanic people, since we use the terms interchangeably even though that's clearly idiotic, is being played by a black guy in your movie. That is bad. It is a deliberate insult to all white people everywhere. Being white is just so hard. Why are people being so mean to white people? I crave attention, even the negative kind, like a small child throwing a loud, floor-pounding tantrum in a supermarket out in the hopes that someone will acknowledge its existence."

The thing is, obviously I haven't seen this movie yet, but I think Elba's going to be kind of awesome in the role; the whole Asgard set looks kind of freaking sweet, and I like the helmet they gave Heimdall. Anyway, these white-supremacist guys don't like the idea of a black guy playing a Norse god, but they try to make their point even more specific by pointing out that Heimdall is described as "whitest of the gods" in the original Norse mythology. They seem to think that this proves that the movie-makers cast him as black just to fuck with them. Now, I'm guessing the casting was intended to suggest that that description of "whitest" doesn't refer to skin color, which is kind of a boring thing to assume it does mean, but, perhaps, to his birth, which like Aphrodite was out of the foam of the sea. Or to his mythological association with rams. Or maybe the filmmakers went with the alternative translation of that line, which would make Heimdall the "brightest" of the gods. Whatever; obviously, there's no reason to think Heimdall should be black. But the only reason to assume he should be white is that when the people were coming up with their myths, they had only ever seen other Nordic people. For a modern cast, it makes total sense to pick whichever actor will be most awesome in the role.

Their problem with it, they claim, is that it's an insult to Heimdall to make him black. Obviously, they don't want to come out and say that, since that tends to alienate everyone who doesn't already agree with them, so instead they try to make it seem like this is about, you know, accuracy. Right. The accurate depiction of a god. The accurate depiction of a comic book character based on a god. Yeah, accuracy is vital here, guys. That's my favorite aspect of the whole thing. I mean, if Norse mythology is so important to them, why are they even ok with the fact that there are comic books about these gods? Comic books that were written, because, as Stan "the Man" Lee has said in interview, he wanted a hero who was even stronger than the Incredible Hulk, and all the Greek gods were too well known, so he read about the Norse gods and decided he liked the idea of a superhero who had a hammer? I mean, that's the source material for the movie; it's not like they're adapting the damn Edda here.

They do grasp for some logic, though, when they try to be like "this is just like when everyone was mad about the casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender!" No, no it isn't, white supremacists. The mis-casting of Avatar stole some of the best roles for Asian actors and gave them to white actors for no reason at all. The casting of Heimdall takes one role away from an all-white pantheon. Cry me a river. There are plenty of roles out there for white people. Who would these boycott guys have cast? A muscular blond guy? Yeah, god knows there aren't enough roles for muscular blond guys in movies. There's just no valid comparison between the casting of this movie and the casting of Avatar.

The website only gets really funny when you look beyond its stated purpose. See, it's not just out to attack the movie Thor; it's out to take down Marvel. Their sidebar reads:

"Marvel has a history of advocating for the left-wing. In early 2010 they even used their Captain America comic to attack the TEA Party movement. Marvel front man Stan "Lee" Lieber personally funds left-wing political candidates. Now Marvel has inserted left-wing social engineering into European mythology, casting a black man to play a Norse deity."

First of all, yes, Marvel does have a history of advocating for the left wing. Like in the 1960s, when the X-Men were used as a platform to advocate for civil rights, both through really heavy handed storylines about bigots who didn't want mutants "in our schools," and even more heavy handed notes by Stan Lee himself in the margins saying "you know what ticks me off? Bigots. Segregation is the worst." Just, you know, as an example. Now, they don't actually USE that example, because they know that anyone who thinks advocating for civil rights in the 1960s was a bad thing is already a member of their stupid group. So instead, they point out that they just used Captain America to attack the Tea Party.

Now, I've never been a big fan of Captain America, myself. But I just became one.

Then they get to Stan Lee. These refer to him as "Stan 'Lee' Lieber."

Ok, bit of Nerdic mythology for ya: Stan "The Man" Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber. So calling him Stan "Lee" Lieber isn't really accurate. If you wanted to give his original name and his current name, you could maybe say "Stanley 'Stan 'The Man' Lee' Martin Lieber." Which is getting a mite awkward to say, I feel. The point is, Stan Lee is his legal and professional name, and calling him by the name he has chosen not to use is a dick move, especially when the goal you're aiming for could be accomplished a lot more efficiently by just calling him "Stan 'Total Jooooo' Lee." I mean come on, white supremacists! Yes, Stan Lee is Jewish. What do you want, a cookie for figuring that one out? Listen to him in interview, he's got an accent you could spread over a bagel! I award you no points and no prizes for figuring that one out, except the "Total Dick Move" prize for using the name he has chosen not to use, which is rude.

As for the rest of their statements here...I'm not sure how having a black actor play a Norse god is left-wing social engineering. I mean, I'm having trouble imagining any left-wing person whose politics depend on the idea that the Norse gods were black.

Regular person: The Norse gods are cool.
Scary Left-Wing Social Engineer: They were black, you know.
Regular person: Really?
Scary Left-Wing Social Engineer: Totes.

If anyone has ever actually heard anyone have that conversation, do please let me know.

The biggest mistake this website makes in terms of trying to tell us how much we should all hate Stan Lee is in posting a video of him. This video, they claim, shows him speaking with Hilary Clinton, and committing felonies.

Firstly, as anyone who has EVER seen Stan Lee speak know, if you're trying to discredit him, showing him speaking is exactly the wrong thing to do. He is, and I say this as a student of the English language, with a full understanding of the meaning of every word and phrase at my disposal, an absolute sweetheart. You watch him, and you feel like your grandfather just gave you a nickel for your birthday, told you a story about the good old days and taught you how to bait a fishing hook (neither of my grandfather either did any of those things, actually but I'm speaking in archetypes here). Discrediting Stan Lee by showing a clip of him talking is the rough equivalent of trying to discredit a puppy by showing how it rolls over on its back so you can scratch its tummy.

So the video shows Stan Lee, and some other dude, on the phone with Hilary Clinton, I guess talking about how Stan is going to show up as a celebrity guest at some fundraiser she's doing. For most of the first few minutes, Stan is sitting there, playing with a binder clip he picked up off the desk, which I guess is some kind of crazy-sinister move if you're a white-supremacist, since it implies a familiarity with paper, and therefor, reading. And knowledge. Then there's what I assume is the big felony moment of the video: Hilary Clinton jokingly promises Stan Lee the post of Secretary of Defense. So that he and Captain America can protect the country together. With the X-Men. And Stan Lee replies "well, I can promise you the mutant vote!"

Yeah. That was some shady, back-room political dealing there, white-supremacists. I mean, I'm aware that these guys were either born without a sense of humor or had it surgically removed shortly after their birth so it wouldn't become an embarrassment to their families , but even that doesn't explain this. What in the flipping Hell-ass is wrong with them? How stupid do you have to be to think that Hilary Clinton is seriously offering an 80+ comic book writer the post of Secretary of Defense in exchange for him bringing in the mutant vote? (Note to white supremacists: the X-Men comics are fiction. Mutants are not a thing. You can put down the anti-mutie signs now.) Wow. Just wow. I mean, it almost gives me hope to think that these are the forces of extremist racism in America; a bunch of dumb assholes who worry about who's going to play a character out of a Marvel comic book in what looks like it's going to be a really long extended explosion of a movie, and who wouldn't know jokey banter if it came up and wrote "Excelsior!" on their foreheads.

So, ultimately, what do we have here? We have a bunch of white-supremacists, who have decided that Norse mythology is really important to them. I can definitely think of a few friends of mine of Scandinavian origin who wish these asses would leave their culture alone. And now they've claimed jurisdiction over the adaptation of a comic-book co-created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and are treating the adaptation of that SUPERHERO COMIC BOOK with as much seriousness as they would an actual cinematic adaption of their mythology. And the fact that basically everyone else in the movie will be white (unless Nick Fury is in this one. Is Nick Fury in this one? I hope so. It is very nearly scientifically impossible to have too much Nick Fury, at least, as played by Samuel L Jackson, not so much when he's played by David Hasselhoff. I still can't believe that happened) besides this one guy just isn't enough for them.

Ugh. I meant to talk about how funny this whole thing is, but all this stupidity is actually just kind of frustrating. I vote we send Ultimate Marvel Nick Fury to kick their asses. And for those who would argue that sending a fictional character against real dumbshits is a bad idea, I would say that these guys don't deserve the time and energy of a real person. I don't propose that anyone with better things to do kick their asses. But alternate universes and suchlike being what they are, I'm sure Ultimate Nick Fury's got the time to spare.

As for me, I think I've spent enough time on them; I'm looking away from the car accident now. And really looking forward to watching Thor.

Boardwalk Empire: A Review

2010-12-20T10:10:00.004-05:00

All right guys, I'm going to say it, I liked Boardwalk Empire, Season One. And it's been getting some pretty harsh criticism, but from what I can make out most of that criticism adds up to "this show failed to live up to my ridiculously high expectations!" and "I thought this show was going to cure cancer with the brilliance of its cinematography, and it TOTALLY DIDN'T!" I'm not sure that's valid criticism. And even if it is, I prefer to actually, you know, enjoy the crap out of a show instead of complaining about the expectations that were built up about it. So here is my story about why I freaking love Boardwalk Empire.

This will have spoilers, y'all. Don't read if you're not into being spoiled, but to tell you the truth, this show wouldn't be ruined by spoilers, at least, it doesn't seem that way to me. It's not exactly driven by the unpredictability of its plots.

Firstly, and this is very, very shallow of me, one of the great things is just the look of the show, because it is flat out gorgeous. The sets, the costumes, the way it's shot, everything is just lovely. It reminds me more of Deadwood than of Mad Men (those being the other big time travel style shows out there) in that the look is sumptuous and just lovingly re-created, but unlike Mad Men the costumes are not necessarily magically tailored to appeal to a modern audience; I think everyone can agree that as gorgeous as Paz de la Huerta is, her costumes and makeup are hardly flattering by modern standards (maybe that's why she's naked about ninety percent of the time she's on screen. Just kidding; I know why Lucy''s naked ninety percent of the time she's on screen. And I ain't complaining, as hilarious as it is. Oh, HBO.) but it sure as hell is authentic. Costumes get rumpled, dirty, like on Deadwood. Some of them look old. The look is authentic, and beautiful. I would watch for the costumes alone.

My favorite thing that Boardwalk Empire does, though, is have characters give what I have decided to arbitrarily call Pants-Shitting Monologues. These are speeches given by Character A designed to make Character B shit his pants. They're not speeches about what Character A will do to Character B or anything like that; they're simply a story about something that happened in Character A's life, which not-so-subtly lets Character B know exactly how much trouble he's in. The first one comes when the New York gangster, Arnold Rothstein has a word with the man who killed Big Jim Colissimo in Chicago. That monologue, which I have decided to call the "cue ball" monologue, for obvious reasons, sets the stage for the monologues to come. It's not a great one, as far as Pants-Shitting Monologues go. It's good, but I'd rate it at the bottom of the chain. The best are Jimmy's "Mutti, Mutti," monologue, which is chilling, and, far and away, Chalky's "book-cases" monologue. Jimmy's is good, probably about one and a half times as good as Rothstein's, but Chalky's just blows it out of the water.

Jimmy's monologue, like Rothstein's, is all about telling the man he's talking to just how little the man's life matters to him. Jimmy describes a memory of his from The Great War; how he watched a wounded German soldier die, slowly, entangled in barbed wire. He talks about offering to put a bullet in the man's head, and having that offer rejected, and he describes the man's calls. "'Mutti, Mutti,'" Jimmy says to the man who drove his girlfriend to suicide. "That's German for 'Mama.'" It's the translation that makes it really perfect; he's not just telling a story about how he became the cold-blooded bastard he is; he's making sure the man who's listening gets the full impact of the long-dead soldier's death cries, and he's making it clear that he understood the full impact of the moment as it was unfolding in front of him. It's an utterly cold move, and it leads up perfectly to the sniping death of the man who mutilated Jimmy's temporary girlfriend. It's great. But it's completely dwarfed by the sheer awesomeness of Chalky's monologue.

One of Chalky's men has been lynched. Of course suspicion falls upon the Klan (though, as it happens, rival bootleggers, the D'Alessio brothers, are to blame), and Eli, Nucky Thompson's fuckup younger brother/sheriff, goes to make the arrest. We open on a KKK meeting; row upon row of white-hooded monsters listening to a purple-hooded monster up on the stage rant about every minority imaginable, until Eli bursts in, with his deputies (I didn't actually get this the first time I watched, but of course Eli is a Catholic, so his hostility towards the Klan would be mutual even if he and Nucky weren't closely allied with Chalky) and, standing in the middle of them all, he demands "Who's in charge here?"

There's a pause. Then all the white hoods point their fingers up towards the ONLY GUY AT THE PODIUM, who is wearing a DIFFERENT COLORED ROBE, and facing the assembled crowd. The sheer "no d'uh" of the moment is absolutely priceless. But Eli breezes right past it, arresting the leader as though it totally wasn't a totally stupid question. Eli ain't the brightest, but he's not going to admit it. How was he to know the guy in the fancy robe, giving a speech on a stage was the one in charge?

Chalky is then brought in for two reasons; he's the one who really needs to know who murdered his underling, but more importantly, he's the guy who will really scare the shit out of the Klansmen. So when Chalky walks in, and is sitting there alone with with this racist KKK douchebag (wow, triple redundancy!), we know some shit is about to go down. And, true to the style of Boardwalk Empire, Chalky tells the man a story.

What makes Chalky's story unique among the Pants Shitting Monologues is that, for one thing, it's completely unnecessary. Does a black man in 1920 (or ever, really) need to explain why he would want to hurt a KKK leader? Does anyone who isn't actually in the KKK need to explain why they would want to hurt a KKK leader? It goes without saying; it's like giving a big speech about why you're going to eat a sandwich when you're hungry. No explanation needed, really.

At least, that's how it appears at the outset. The speech is such an amazing piece of PantsShitting Monologuery that it completely transcends petty issues like "does he actually need to explain it?" because when the explanation comes in such a great monologue the answer is "yes, he totally does."

The other thing that makes Chalky's monologue different from Rothstein's and Jimmy's is it's not just about "this one time I was a cold-hearted bastard." It's a story about how Chalky could have been a much better man; a craftsman, like his father, instead of a bootlegger and a gangster (who, we should remember, used the death of one of his employees to negotiate for an increase in percentage of profits from Nucky just one episode ago. Which pretty much tells you what a cold-hearted bastard he is with no monologue necessary). He could have grown up to be a very different man; a man who created things of beauty. The tone of Michael Kenneth Williams' voice when he describes the bookcases his father made is heartbreaking, as is the irony-tinged pride when he talks about being let into a rich, white household "by the front door." It all falls apart, as we knew it would have to, when he talks about his father's murder at the hands of a lynch mob, and Chalky gets the second best line of the season when he sets a carpenter's toolbag on the table in front of the chained-up Klansman and says, lovingly, "These my daddy's tools."

Williams' face is almost beatific as he says the line. It's a pure, beautiful moment of menace and righteous anger. And the Klansman is too shaken to do more than quaveringly ask "what are you going do with them?"

And that's when Chalky gets the absolute best line of the season. Hands down, the best line. With genuine sadness and a hint of real regret in his voice, he says "I ain't building no bookcases."

The sadness is perfect; tragic. I read it as a moment where Chalky, the son of a craftsman, an artist, spares a bit of regret for the honest, beautiful life he could have led, if it hadn't been for people like the man now sitting in front of him. Unlike the monologues of Jimmy and Rothstein, Chalky's monologue makes what he's about to do seem inevitable.

Yeah, it's a little weird that we never see any fallout from Chalky mutilating that Klansman. I'm not sure it's believable that in 1920 a black man, even one as important in local government as Chalky, could get away with cutting off the finger of a white man while that man was in police custody, but I'm willing to let it slide because DAMN that monologue was good and because I want them to keep Chalky around, because he's awesome.

Chalky has been the most under-utilized character on the entire show. Every scene he's in is amazing, and there's a very clear thread to his character. He takes a lot of shit, but he bides his time, and sooner or later he seizes an opportunity. That's pretty much the guaranteed way, if movies and television have taught me anything, to be an effective gangster. When he finally has the D'Alessio brothers in front of him, he doesn't actually know for sure until one of them opens his bit fat mouth, that these are the men who murdered his employee, but when one of them lets something slip, revealing that he was the one who did it, Chalky goes right from affable businessman to full-on bad-ass in about half a second, spinning around with a gun in each hand and coldly demanding "how'd you know I drive a Packard?" Again, a line that has very little inherent menace, but damn does Williams/Chalky make it work.

That's what makes him a way cooler gangster than, for example, Rothstein; when Rothstein wants to scare someone, he actually has to, you know, SAY SOMETHING SCARY. Chalky can just take a few innocuous words and make them terrifying. He could make you beg for mercy by remarking on the weather.

And of course, what's fun about that is that he's not an antagonist, like Rothstein; he's very much on Nucky's side (as he proves in that slightly cross-purposed scene where Meyer Lansky makes him an offer on Rothstein's behalf, and he assumes Nucky is testing him) and he's really nothing but sympathetic. He's hands-down my favorite character on the show, and I really hope we see a lot more of him next season. By the end of season one, he's in the room with Nucky and the politicians, preparing for the election. He's the first black man we've seen in that room who didn't come in to shine Nucky's shoes; him being there is huge, and, being the awesome character that he is, he immediately demands more: an invitation to the victory party at Babbette's that night. Nucky tries to act like he won't say yes, but by the end of the episode, there Chalky is, in the closing scene, standing at the bar at Babbette's with a class-looking lady as his date, as the champagne flows around them. He's in with Nucky and the others now, and he's there to stay, so it'll be fun to see where that goes in Season Two.

Another amazing character, whose face is almost as immovable as Chalky's is Van Alden. (I'd like to get those two in a room and see who could go the longest without twitching a facial muscle. It'd be a hell of a contest. What I like, though, about the two men in contrast to each other is that Van Alden's face is this kind of stony, expressionless mask, whereas Chalky's is a slightly bored, slightly tired of your shit expression that hasn't yet decided whether it's going to react to what you've said. Rothstein actually comes in third on the awesome-immovable-face thing, solely because of that grotesque not-really-a-smile smile he does when he's threatening someone with, say, a story about this one time he killed a dude with a cue ball for no reason, and they have the nerve to crack a stupid joke.) But I think I began this paragraph to transition to talking about Van Alden, so here goes.

Van Alden is basically the craziest motherfucker you'll ever come across. This is drawn out nicely by the show; he slowly lets visibly crazier and crazier as the season goes on. First, we see him creepily steal Margaret's hair ribbon, and later inhale deeply of its scent. Next, we see him stick his GODDAMN HAND into a witness's gaping stomach wound and SQUEEZE THINGS until the witness gives him the information he wants/dies, then quote the book of goddamn Revelations over the body (Sebso, bemused: "isn't he Jewish?") in a kind of reverse last rites, committing the dead man's soul to Hell. It's a scene I could, if I were an asshole, describe as "gut-wrenching." But I wouldn't do that to you. Anyway, then he's flogging himself with a goddamn belt while staring at Margaret's photograph (taken at age sixteen! Gaaah! Also the belt is buckle-side-down as he flogs himself. GAAAAAH! And his back is already covered with scars from similar self-flagellations. GAAAAAAAAAAH!). Finally, we see him descend into full on religious and moral mania, approaching Margaret with offers of "salvation," and drowning Agent Sebso, his partner, in a forced baptism/waterboarding. (I kind of can't believe I've never seen a baptism as murder by drowning scene before. It seems so obvious in retrospect). He's a kettle of crazy, gradually boiling over until people are dead. And it's a lot of fun to watch.

Sebso, in contrast, is basically a somewhat bland, somewhat pleasant sort of schlub who's not very good at being a Prohibition agent, and, we eventually learn, not all that good at being a corrupt Prohibition agent, either. He starts out as a nicely incompetent foil to Van Alden; a guy to stand back and go "did that really just happen?" while Van Alden strides around, stone-faced and insane. What becomes very fun about their interaction, as their relationship starts to sour, is that Van Alden is completely right to be suspicious of Sebso; he is indeed on the take, and he did indeed stage the murder of an important witness, on Nucky's orders, but Van Alden's suspicion is based on all the wrong things. By the last few episodes, their conversations look like this:

Sebso: *looks suspicious*
Van Alden: I find you suspicious.
Sebso: Who, me? *says something suspicious*
Van Alden: You have new shoes. I find that suspicious as well.
Sebso: They were on sale!
Van Alden: You can use chopsticks. I find that VERY suspicious.
Sebso: They're useful for eating tasty food! Also, what?
Van Alden: You're Jewish. I can't tell you how INCREDIBLY suspicious I find that.
Sebso: I have no idea how to respond to that.
Van Alden: You should get baptized.
Sebso: ....but these are new shoes....
Van Alden: I know. I find that suspicious.
Sebso:....yeah. You said.
Van Alden: *Does that fake sneeze thing where he's really saying the word "Jew"*
Sebso: Oh, for Christ's sake-
Van Alden: Don't take the Lord's name in vain! I find people taking the Lord's name in vain SUSPICIOUS!
Sebso: Seriously?
Van Alden: Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how suspicious you are. And by suspicious, I mean Jewish. And also just suspicious.

And then of course, later the conversation becomes a lot more:

Deacon: Uh, sure, you can baptize him, I guess.
Van Alden: Yay!
Sebso:I'm still a Jew...
River:*is full of water*
Sebso's Lungs: *ditto*
Van Alden: *is insane*
Deacon:*is uncomfortable*
Sebso: *is underwater*
Van Alden: SOMETHING ABOUT JESUS!
Deacon: Baptism: ur doin it rong!
Sebso: *iz ded*
Van Alden: I FIND YOUR DROWNING SUSPICIOUS!
Deacon: Pretty sure that's witches, man. And it works the other way around. And doesn't count if you hold them under. The Hell?
Van Alden: I have a gun, and am totally white.
Deacon: Ah. So you do. And are. Whatever you say, you bugfuck loco bastard.
Van Alden: *walks away*
Deacon: Uh...were you just going to leave your dead Jew here?
Van Alden: Pretty much, yeah. *is insane*

I think my favorite thing about the whole incident is the way the Deacon asks Van Alden, when he first shows up talking about baptism, if he wants to come wash away his sins. And Van Alden is just like "what? No, no sin here, I'm good! It's this guy; he murders witnesses, eats weird food and is really consistently Jewish. Me, I'm good. Nope, no sin at all." While we in the audience are just like "uh, didn't you totally just drink a whole bunch of whiskey and then bang Lucy? What, did you FORGET you did that? Well, we didn't, because the image is indelibly SEARED INTO OUR BRAINS, YOU CREEPY BASTARD! GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Oh, and a piece of info the ladies of Boardwalk Empire might want to keep in mind: Nelson Van Alden is not a good lay. He will end up crying in fetal position. Weirdly, this seems to be a best case scenario; I was pretty sure for a bit there that Lucy was going to die. So unless crying in fetal position is something you enjoy in bed, do not bang Nelson Van Alden. This has been a public service announcement. Thank you.

(In fact, Bess and I got bored one evening and decided to figure out who, on Boardwalk Empire, you should most avoid sleeping with. We ranked Van Alden right down at the bottom, well below the next runner-up for last place, who was Rothstein, who we have decided probably has sex like he plays pool; with excellent form, but coldly, dispassionately, precisely, and probably while drinking tea and talking about how he so didn't fix the World Series and he's sick of hearing about it. Van Alden is worse in bed than that guy. Yeah.)

A lot of people on the internet, people I will here term "stupid" wondered why the black congregation watching Sebso's murder didn't stop it. Let's break down the scene.

So Van Alden shows up, for the second time, at this black church's baptism place. He's a white federal agent, with a gun. He's been there before, and he's seemed less than friendly, but this time he seems nothing but friendly, and he's encouraging his partner to come down to the water and accept Jesus.

The congregation claps and encourages the nervous-looking Sebso to do so. So now, from a crowd mentality point of view, they're part of the group that's putting him in the water. One of them is holding his shoes, which he takes off (they're new!) before stepping into the water. They don't want this to be a bad thing. They want this to be about Christ; that's why they're there. Van Alden makes them all complicit in the baptism, which makes it hard for any one of them to recognize that it's all gone sour, even when it starts to be clear that Van Alden is not so much baptizing the unwilling Sebso as waterboarding the fuck out of him, asking questions about how that witness came to die, and forcibly shoving his struggling partner under water again and again, alternating demands that the man admit to the murder of a witness with demands that he accept Jesus.

Psychologically, in a crowd situation, people will hang back, waiting for someone else to speak out first, especially when they all feel partially responsible. You're holding the man's shoes; are you going to be the one to announce that this baptism has become a torture? A murder? So yes, I think that the reaction of the crowd; that of dumbfounded inaction, as Van Alden forcibly baptized/tortured/straightup murdered Sebso, was completely realistic.

As well as being hella dramatic, and a nice culmination of Van Alden's insanity, I actually found Sebso's death all the more poignant because his last word was a half-drowned, spluttered, "No," said in reaction to Van Alden's final demand that he accept Jesus Christ. Sebso, for all that he sucked as a Prohibition agent and as a corrupt Prohibition agent, actually managed to die true to Judaism, and, not gonna lie, as much of an atheist-type Jew as I am, I found that quite moving. Rest in peace, Sebso; you weren't the brightest corrupt law-enforcement officer, but you were still smarter than Eli. Hell, dead, you might be smarter than Eli. (Or IS HE? See the last episode...I'm not sure if that last revelation about Eli makes him smart, or way, way dumb.)

As the camera pulled back from the drowning, I was waiting for a shot that I really didn't want to see. There was going to be an overhead shot, I could tell. There always is when someone drowns. And it was going to frame Sebso as a crucifix, face up, arms floating out on the water. They always do that in movies and television. I could tell it was going to happen; and I was pre-emptively annoyed. It was entirely inappropriate, and totally cliched, but to my relief, when the overhead shot came, Sebso was lying curled up, his upstream arm against his side and his downstream arm at a vague angle. Hooray! I thought. No cross-pose. And then Van Alden, fucking insane Van Alden as he stepped out of the water, became the crucifix, but it was with a gun in one hand, and a badge in the other, brandishing the symbols of his authority and his white privilege, silently telling the congregation "you haven't seen a damn thing." Not entirely uncliched, but I still found it awesome.

It worked, for me. Having fulfilled the action dictated to him by his religious mania, that of baptizing/killing his heathen/corrupt partner (the ideas are insanely intertwined in his mind, which is, by the way, insane.), Van Alden takes refuge in his authority as much as in his supposed righteousness. I've heard complaints about the fact that, in that moment he seems to get away with it, but it seemed to me that it was utterly in character, for absolutely everyone involved. I also find it entirely believable that a black congregation in fucking NINETEEN-TWENTY would know full well that their testimony would not matter against this guy's; a white federal agent with the audacity and madness necessary to do something like that, and so I do buy their not reporting it. Van Alden comes across as truly terrifying, and I find it very plausible that the congregation would have no desire to mess with him.

What I didn't love about the scene, ultimately, was the way that Van Alden seems to have, in the final episode, managed to convince everyone that Sebso died of a heart attack. I'm counting on season two to have something to say about that, whether as a result of Van Alden's religious guilt (doubtful, as Van Alden=insane, see above) or the cops actually managing to stop sucking for two seconds and realize that the man's lungs were full of water. Or investigate the unlikelihood of a skinny dude like Sebso all of a sudden dropping of a heart-attack. I'm interested to see how this plays out, though frankly, the last episode of the season didn't do it for me.

(As another side note, here's a statistic I noticed in Van Alden's life:
Jews With Whom Van Alden Has Knowningly Been In The Same Room For More Than a Minute:2
Jews Whom Van Alden Has Brutally Murdered With His Bare Hands: 2
Non-Jews Whom Van Alden Has Killed, Bare Hands, Brutally, Or Otherwise: Zero.

Alls I'm sayin', is that if I were Rothstein I'd be very, very careful if I ever found myself around Van Alden, and maybe keep a cue ball handy. Or a Luciano. As a side note to this side note, am I the only one who thinks Rothstein and Luciano are totally a gay couple? Didn't think so. In the early 20th century, red neckties were a cultural signifier used by gay men to identify themselves to one another. Rothstein wears a red tie. And once, we see Luciano HELP HIM PUT IT ON. Yeah, no way those two aren't doin' it. But I digress.).

I just realized that this review is getting incredibly long, and I have not addressed any of the main characters. Margaret, Nucky, or Jimmy. Or Jimmy's wife and her girlfriend. Or about half the things I wanted to get into, because I got so caught up in talking about how great Chalky is and how crazy Van Alden is. Ok, one more character, and I'll make it a side character, so as to maintain my bizarre avoidance of the MCs.

Richard Harrow. Richard goddamn Harrow. Obviously, the first thing you notice about him is the way he stands as a foil for Jimmy (so there, I am addressing one main character, albeit indirectly) who's finding himself pretty tragically unable to process his wartime experience. And with good reason; during WWI having PTSD was still a get-shot-for-cowardice offense, and his every attempt to talk about what he went through is basically met with either Nucky telling him that he didn't have to go, or Angela wondering where his sunny disposition went. In fact, the one real piece of sympathy we see in the whole show is Nucky remarking "We take it for granted, but I'm sure the whole war was very trying." That's it? World War freaking One was very trying? It's an understatement to end all understatements (see what I did there?), so it's no surprise that when Jimmy meets Harrow, a man as visibly scarred as Jimmy is mentally scarred, he latches on to him as a kindred spirit. And of course, Harrow is just a fascinating character; good with kids, but also perfectly willing to shoot them in the face, which is fun. The fact that he's the one who helps Jimmy avenge the far-less scarred, but still facially mutilated Pearl, is nice as well. I want more of him next season, and I want to see his issues play out, not just have him get abandoned.

Uh, I was going to talk about a bunch of other stuff, but this is getting crazylong. In conclusion, Margaret is really great, Angela is tragic as all Hell (Jimmy to his son, when Angela returns after her failed attempt to run off with her lover, Mary: "soon it'll be just us boys." He says it right where Angela can hear, without speaking to her. Scary? Scary. I fear for her safety.) and Nucky and Eli are going to be interesting to watch. Nucky's tendency to hand massive wads of cash to people without a second thought is really funny; a friend of mine suggested that Nucky's ledger that Margaret reads should have a column for "Big Wads of Cash Handed Out" with an asterisk indicating "in 1920!" I also love the way the show grounds itself in the culture of the 20s, constant appearances by celebrities of the day, both forgotten and remembered. My favorite is the episode where Nucky spends all day trying to convince people that they really want to go and see "Hardeen. Houdini's brother. But he's just as good!" only to have whoever he's talking to give him a look like "is he, though? Really?" And then we finally see him, and yeah, he's not as good. It was oddly hilarious.

Yeah, the show is heavy handed as all Hell. It's dramatic, and fun, and over the top, and I'm willing to accept a few incredibly silly bits of imagery (Nucky's muddy footprints across the hotel lobby leap to mind, as does the bloodstain on Margaret's ill-gotten dress) in exchange for the fun drama, the bad-assery, and the occasional moment of pure hilarity, like Nucky's irritation with his brother's dumbassery, or Eli watching porn with his buddies in his brother's office. I'm also willing to accept the show's occasional plotlines that fizzle, like the Nucky/Rothstein conflict. After a season of lines like "Is this how you do business, Mister Thompson?" "You want to see how I do business? Show your face in Atlantic City again!" and "What are you going to do about Rothstein?" "I'm going to make him the richest corpse in New York City!" it all came to a bunch of nothing, though I imagine it'll be interesting to see whether Jimmy and Luciano ever really reconcile. Oh, and what in the flipping Hell is Van Alden going to do now that he's knocked up Lucy? Take that, Van Alden: a problem you can't just waterboard away.

Overall, I'd place this show well below Deadwood, which I consider the gold standard(yeah, haha, see what I did there; gold is basically the center of Deadwood) of time-travel shows, but still pretty damn high. The flaws, for the most part, just make it fun; something to laugh about (seriously? Paz de la Huerta is naked AGAIN? Does she OWN clothes? Oh, there they are. She's wearing clothes! OH MY GOD, NOW SHE'S NAKED AGAIN! There are men out there who have seen their wives naked fewer times than we've seen Lucy), and I'm hoping that the more serious flaws (I DEMAND more Chalky. More Chalky, or I walk!) will be resolved in the second season.

Boardwalk Empire. If I can talk about it for this long, and still not have talked about half the things I wanted to, it must be a damn good show, right?

The Enclave, Part Two

2010-12-15T22:27:00.008-05:00

You have now heard about the first time that the Enclave tried to straight-up murder our asses. Now it is time for you to hear about the second/third/fourth times. I say second/third/fourth because it tried to kill me, MirMir, individually, one of those times, and me and Bess together the other time, but it clearly had distinct plans in mind for the both of us, so I think it qualifies.

For those just tuning in, the Enclave was the hell-hole of an apartment that Bess and I shared during college. It is described here, but not, I feel, in such a way as to adequately describe the sheer suck of the place, so I'm going to embellish a little bit before I continue.

This place was COLD. I mean, yes, Chicago is a cold city and all, but this place was extra double plus cold. It had two doors, one to the regular part of the building, and one to the scary back-door staircase. The scary back-door staircase was completely open to the elements, in the form of missing windows, and a door to the roof which was basically a piece of plywood that did not cover the hole it was supposed to cover, and the ricketiest ladder in existence. We noticed those empty windowframes, so we kept the door to the backdraft staircase of awfulness locked, for security purposes, but that could not quite keep out the howling cold wind.

And even if it had, it wouldn't have made the place warm. Every wall in the apartment was made of draft, and the landlord generally turned on the radiators sometime in January.
We generally wore all our clothes at once, which was something to do while we listened to the weak-ass radiators make those strange noises they made. We named them; there was a sound like a puppy, a sound like a dragon, and a sound like some bees. Sometimes they would all fight. Good times.

I just realized, though, that I forgot to tell you the full scariness of the backdoor staircase. This little anecdote will give you a nice insight into the minds of MirMir and Bess.

We had ventured out into the backdraft staircase, to smoke a cigarette out the window. Or rather, Bess had. I had ventured out to keep her company and bitch about how cold it was, as was my wont. That done, we opened the door to our apartment. It opened into the kitchen. We had gone not one step inside when we both turned to each other and said those words so often heard before someone dies horribly in a bad movie:

"Did you hear that?"

And this is where we swung into action. Convinced there were burglars/rapists/ninjas in our apartment, we snuck up to the counter. I slid a drawer open, with cat-like stealth, only louder. Wordlessly, Bess took out a cleaver and a breadknife, and handed one of them to me. Then I said "hello! We know you're in there! We're armed, all right! So you should probably go. Or something." I may be quoting slightly incorrectly. Anyway, those figments of our imagination took off, which was lucky for us because a breadknife? Really? Also, why didn't we just use the sketchy staircase to knock on our neighbor's door and ask them to call the cops? Because we're dumb, that's why.

So, other things that were bad about this apartment. It was RIGHT ON the El tracks. I mean, it was, just so we're clear, technically on the wrong side of the tracks, but mostly it was just RIGHT ON THEM. How close? Close enough that we once hit our friend, the Friendly El Security Guard with a snowball from our window sill. Also close enough that our Not Friend, the Creepy as Fuck El Security Guard once videotaped our living room. Close enough that any movie we watched while living there had big gaps in it while we paused until the train had gone by so that we could hear dialogue. Close enough that the words "This. Is Noyes. Doors open on the left. At Noyes," will forever echo in my head like a sound heard in a godforsaken nightmare. Close enough that when that weird earthquake happened in Chicago, our first thought was that it was just the train shaking our apartment again. Close enough that this once happened:

So it's November. It's a Saturday morning. It's 9 am. I'm hungover. I'm going to the kitchen for water, when I hear this godawful cacophony out the window. Like, more obnoxious than the usual train. I throw open the window, and blink blearily at what turns out to be the freaking light-bedecked, carol blasting, way-too-brightly-colored Christmas Train. It's blasting cheer at me like a damn assault rifle. One of the elves or something catches my hostile glare and shouts "Hi there! Merry Christmas!"

"It's NINE IN THE MORNING!" I shouted back, wincing at the sound of my own voice, but sufficiently filled with rage to yell anyway. "It's NOVEMBER! And I'm JEWISH!"

My point is, I was close enough to see his face fall at my outpouring of Grinchitude as I slammed the window shut again. I'm pretty sure his pointy ears actually drooped, but that might have been my imagination. Not one of my prouder moments, but it never would have happened if we hadn't lived so maddeningly close to the El stop.

Let's see, how else was that place awful? Well, the dumpsters right outside the window were a delight in the summer. And there was that wall that was kind of falling down. And that bit of the ceiling. And the airshaft by our bathroom window lead right to the bathroom of the neighbor who sang showtunes in the shower. And then there was that time the crappy AC broke down, right before a massive heatwave, when we had a person living on our couch. (We were like yeah, you can still stay, but we're going to be living in our underwear and consuming nothing but beer and popsicles. She moved on rather quickly. We would have if we could have.) And...look, at this rate I'm NEVER getting to the tried-to-kill-us part.

So, attempts three and four. Yeah, they're coming before two. Because fuck continuity, that's why.

We had a gas stove. As do many people, I'm sure. So nothing weird about that. And we'd noticed that our gas bill was a little high, but we figured, eh, whatcha gonna do? But then we started smelling gas. Like, a lot.

It was then that the Enclave's plan became apparent. As you may recall from Bess's description, my walls did not reach the ceiling. This was to permit the passage of light, and presumably, air, but when there is GAS IN THE KITCHEN, this is NOT A GOOD THING. The Enclave had a devious plot, and it was this.

One dark night, I was going to smother to death on kitchen gas. I would pass quietly, in my sleep. The next morning, or rather, the next evening, since Bess can sleep for Britain, and would probably not awaken until about seven pm if left to her own devices, Bess would step out of her room, to discover me dead. She would then decide that she really needed a cigarette to calm her tormented nerves.

I think you can see where this is going. We blow the hell up, as does the rest of our building. Fortunately, this didn't happen, and when the smell got bad we'd crack a window, which contributed nicely to the whole cold as Hell thing.

So that brings me to the time the Enclave really went for me. This one is not for the faint of heart.

I was sleeping. It was hot. I was sleeping in the altogether (I've always wanted to use that phrase) with my ceiling fan on.

You know when you're asleep and you hear a loud-ass noise, and it wakes you up, but because you were sleeping, you didn't quite hear it so have no idea what it was but your blood is just jangling with adrenaline and your cave-person instincts are pretty sure it was a bear? Well, that. That happened. And I could hear some sort of crazy sound but was way too just-woke-up/hyperalert to figure out what it was. Then Bess bursts in.

I did that thing women do in movies where they pull up the sheet to cover themselves after waking up in bed with someone who has clearly just seen them naked and obviously liked what they saw. It made way more sense for me to do that, as Bess and I kind of try to avoid seeing each other naked. Anyway, she threw the light on, while (because she's good at multitasking) shrieking "what the HELL?"

Things soon became clear. The crazy sound was my ceiling fan, spinning off-center and threatening to fall out of the ceiling. And the noise that had awoken me and Bess was one of the giant, wooden sword-like fan-blades FLYING OFF THE FAN FOR NO DAMN REASON and hitting the wall above my bed.

Look, Enclave. A little deadly gas, an El stalker, near-fatal cold and just-as-near-fatal heat, I'm willing to take. But when you start throwing fucking swords at me in my sleep, you and I are going to need to have WORDS.

SteamFail: It's a Lot Like Regular Fail, But Steamier

2010-12-08T01:47:00.003-05:00

MirMir here, with a story about SteamFail.

I think having morals at the ends of stories is boring. It's been done, you know? I think they should come at the beginning, so that we can keep them in mind as we read and process the story. Don't you? No? Then skip this next bit and come back and read the morals later. They'll still be here.

Moral #1: Just because you say that the work you do is satirical does not mean that it will be perceived that way. That's not the fault of your audience for failing to understand your intentions, it's your fault for not making your intentions clear. Yeah, it's true that there will always be a few people who don't get satire. These are the people who forward Onion articles in all seriousness, or think that Stephen Colbert is a for-serious conservative pundit. I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about the majority of your audience; if you need to tell them you're being satirical, then Satire: You're Doing It Wrong.

Moral #2: If your group is widely perceived as being white supremacist or pro-white power, seriously reconsider the way you present yourselves. Do not assume that the people who find you to be white supremacist are in the wrong, or "have a chip on their shoulder." Do not claim to not be white supremacist, and then request a pat on the head for refraining from using racial slurs in public. To paraphrase Chris Rock, you get no points for doing what you're SUPPOSED to do.

Moral #3: I like getting into arguments.

All right, now that we've had all the spoilers, I'll talk about this discussion I got into at a recent steampunk event. There was a group there, with personas, a fictional world worked out, and a backstory explaining how their world had gotten the way it was. I got into a discussion/argument about it, because it seemed to me that the fictional alternate history they had developed was disturbingly like the real history, in that they had fundamentally altered reality, yet still presumed a European conquest of the New World. Why, I asked, had the Native Americans not conquered Europe? Or at least fended off European invaders? Why had China not conquered the entire world? Why hadn't the Muslim world conquered everything? They had answers for everything, it's true, and their answers were well thought out enough, but they were geared towards creating an historical timeline that would allow them to get to where they wanted to be. Which was with Scandinavians/Romans in charge of a significant chunk of the world.

Look, I have no problem with Scandinavians or Romans. I like them a lot, actually. But if you're going to go so far as to set up an alternate history that starts changing the world, on a pretty serious level, as far back as pre-history, as theirs did, why go to all that trouble just to have Europeans dominate the New World all over again? I immediately started picking at their history. The more my friends and I questioned them, the more it became clear that they had not considered the possibility of any other outcome, and didn't particularly want to. They had a eurocentric conclusion, and they were determined to make it stick.

So...fine. Ok, they had that. And my friends and I were arguing with them about it. "Why wouldn't the Native Americans have won?" I asked "When the real Vikings couldn't even hold on to the Vinland colony?" The problem then was not their answers, but the way they were worded. I don't claim that if the Vikings had been able to basically teleport as many of their people as they liked to wherever they wanted, they might not have been able to kick a lot of ass. But whenever challenged, these guys would use words and phrases I don't care for in their replies. Words and phrases like "more advanced civilization." Their answers laughed off a lot of real-world achievements by people of color, and were basically condescending and dismissive in their discussion of non-European cultures. Not to mention stereotypical and racist. I'm sorry guys, but when you've used the phrase "the Zulu were known for being cruel," you've lost whatever leg you thought you were still standing on.

It was about a half hour in to the conversation that I was informed (by one of my friends, not by the guys themselves) that their whole storyline was meant to be satirical. Could've fooled me; we'd been discussing it with straight faces since the conversation began. No one was laughing; they were talking about it the way Civil War re-enactors describe the lead-up to Antietam. Guys, if you need to TELL PEOPLE something is a satire, it has failed as satire. The idea that something is so audacious that people will assume it's meant as a joke only works when that something is so ridiculous it can't be taken seriously. Like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You're not even being close to that ridiculous. What one of my friends quickly pointed out to these dudes was that there are plenty of people who have equally white-supremacist alternate histories that are NOT intended satirically. As the other friend summed it up "your idea of absurd, over-the-top satire is someone elses' Tuesday."

If you want something to be seen as satire, it's not just about being over the top; there are always people being that over the top in all seriousness. That's why there will never be an effective parody of the Westboro Baptist Church. The only way you can do satire, beyond just going over the top, is to constantly make yourself appear ridiculous as you imitate that which you are trying to mock. Like Stephen Colbert. Like the guys strutting around in Springtime for Hitler. Like Professor Elemental, who dresses as a British imperialist explorer, but deliberately makes himself ridiculous with every word that comes out of his mouth and every item in his wardrobe. These guys were way too wedded to making themselves look awesome while doing their "satire." They wanted to stand around in cool uniforms, not poke fun at themselves.

So no, you don't get to claim "we meant it as a joke," because guess what? We can't read your minds, and you're not coming across as satirical, you're coming across as racist. You know what's not helping? Basically telling my friend, a woman of color, who was gently trying to give you tips to help you stop offending people, that she was being overly sensitive and not looking at things from your point of view. Guess what, guys in "satirical" pith helmets? If you're telling a woman of color that she needs to make more of an effort to understand your white, male point of view, you need to stop talking.

They did make an effort to make my friend like them, though. It was obvious they wanted her approval, and just as obvious that they were hoping for a "woman of color seal of approval" on their whole thing, and when she made it clear that they weren't going to get it, one of them actually shot down her offer to continue the dialogue by email. If she didn't like what they were doing, they didn't want to hear about it.

The real clincher in this whole conversation, from where I was sitting, came when the guys complained that people sometimes incorrectly view them as a white supremacist group. They seemed displeased by this, and somewhat baffled. I casually said that that might happen less if everyone in their group wasn't white. Jaws literally dropped. I'm not kidding; mouths hung open, and they looked at each other, and one of them said "do we know any..."

I could try to comment on that, but words fail me. It was like the idea that their group could, you know, include a person of color, had never occurred to them. They then explained that their group just didn't seem to attract people of color, and mentioned that it attracted people who were "into history," as though those two groups didn't overlap at all. No guys, the problem isn't that people of color don't like history, the problem is that the narrative you're pushing is intensely hostile and unappealing to people of color. They're not the problem, you are.

Later the guys mentioned that although their PERSONAS would likely say very racist things, they themselves did not do so in public, since people would misunderstand. They implied that they do it in private, but were very clear about making a point of not doing it in public.

Sorry dudes, you get no cookie for your brave and self-sacrificing decision not to shout racial slurs in public.

So yeah. Enough of them. The thing about steampunk is that it is a diverse and interesting community, but it has its flaws. A lot of those flaws wear pith helmets. And we as steampunks have to be just as ready to reject racism and bigotry within the community as we would outside of it. A bigoted alternative historical narrative and an arrogant refusal to listen to people who have a problem with it, are not things we should tolerate.

You can go back and check the morals now, if you didn't read them already. But what I'm saying is that there is no reason for steampunk to be racist, unless there are racist people in steampunk. These guys are not representative of steampunk at all, and the best way to show them, and other people that is to call them out on their fail at every opportunity. So let us all keep starting fights with them that should be fought with. This is a good subculture, it doesn't need any racist crap in it, and keeping racist crap out is as easy as recognizing it, and rejecting it.

Steampunk: A Truly DIY Culture

2010-12-06T23:12:00.000-05:00

This article is not about steampunk fashion, or steampunk devices, although I think those things are fantastic, especially when they are homemade. (I generally think steampunk fashion is fantastic, I believe I blogged about that at some point). Rather, this is about the way that I feel steampunks are a DIY culture in terms of media. DIY might be the wrong term; perhaps a better one would be "appropriatey." Yeah, that's a more accurate term, but it sounds freaking stupid, so I'll stick with DIY and just explain myself, and hope that you guys can figure out what I mean. I'll include a glossary at the end, for your convenience, and because I like glossaries.

Much of what constitutes steampunk culture was never intended to be "steampunk," as such. Many of the works beloved by steampunks were created with no hint of the word "steampunk" in mind, or even awareness of the existence of steampunks. But steampunk thrives on looking at things, saying "that! That is something I like!" and simply taking it in under the steampunk banner. I'm not just talking about things that were created in the 19th century, although of course the re-appropriation of Victorian literature, art, technology, music, fashion, etc, is one of the main bases for steampunk; I'm talking about the ability of steampunks to pick up things created after the invention of the steampunk label, which were not actually intended by their creator to be steampunk.

This has happened in the film world a lot. Let us examine the category of "movies in which David Bowie appears that have steampunk fan bases they probably never set out to get." I know, I like to keep my categories specific. Twitter hashtag that one, guys. Anyway, Labyrinth and the Prestige have both become beloved by steampunks, though Labyrinth was made before steampunk became "a thing" as it were, and the Prestige was probably intended to be more of a psychological thriller with magic in it than a steampunk favorite. And that's just within the acting career of David Bowie! Check out another extremely specific category I just made up, that of "sub-par films starring Johnny Depp and involving serial murders" and you find Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and From Hell, all of which I've personally enjoyed both for their over-the-topness and for their steampunk aesthetic. Only Sweeny Todd was made after steampunk really took off, and apart from some gratuitous gears, there's no reason to think it was made with steampunks in mind. There are dozens of films like those, that have been adopted by steampunks, despite likely having no intention of appealing to us specifically.

Now, here's another example:

The band that wrote and performed that song do not consider themselves steampunk. Their fanbase does not seem to be made up of steampunks. But think of any gathering of steampunks you've ever been to, and imagine that music playing in the background. Entirely appropriate, isn't it? So what's to stop steampunks from listening to it, and declaring it steampunk? Absolutely nothing, and it happens all the time. Many bands have taken up the steampunk label once they realize that steampunks have become their fanbase, but they need not do so to be beloved by the community. And I think that's glorious; we can enjoy anything that appeals to our aesthetic, or our mindset, or whatever, and as long as the artist doesn't get out on stage and say "you know what I hate? Bustles. To hell with you, bustle-wearers," or "steam is a terrible way of powering things," we're probably not going to have any issues with adopting them. They can then become more "steampunk" in their looks or subject matter or not, as they prefer, but there's nothing to stop fans from liking them either way.

Again, I think it's great; we don't need movies and music explicitly tailored to our needs, and while I like Abney Park and The Amazing Screw-On Head as much as the next steampunk, I can also get a huge kick out of movies and music that just happen to have a good steampunk-friendly aesthetic going on.

Anyway, that's what I meant by "DIY culture." It's not just that we're in a culture that encourages each other to create our own costumes, personas, inventions, and so on, but we're in a culture that has no problem taking a look at something created by another subculture, or by the mainstream, and saying "yeah, looks nice. I'll have that!" And everyone wins; they get new fans, we get new art that isn't being spoon-fed to us by someone trying to figure out what we like and what will sell. We are a culture created out of the unintentional appeal of the works of other cultures, which means we can drag in anything that we consider awesome and make it our own. We can stretch our definitions to fit whatever we happen to enjoy, cobbling together a body of art, literature, and music that is steampunk because we say it's steampunk.

And that brings me to a few definitions:

Steampunk music= any music listened to and enjoyed by steampunks, and considered by them to have steampunk elements or aesthetics. Any argument about whether a piece of music is "legitimately steampunk" should be considered moot before it starts.
Steampunk literature= any literature read and enjoyed by steampunks, and considered by them to have steampunk elements or aesthetics. See above.
Steampunk film=any film viewed and enjoyed by steampunks, and considered by them to have steampunk elements or aesthetics. See above.
Steampunk= anyone who considers themselves a steampunk probably is. Let's not be one of those subcultures that develops a "gothier than thou" complex, ok? We all have something we like in common, so let's just all hang out and like it! Doesn't that sound nice?

(And if I sound like Pollyanna, have you considered that film for a steampunk/optimism extravaganza? Aunt Polly rocked some amazing dresses, man. And check out that fire wagon!)

I would love it if people would comment with books, music, or films they feel that steampunk has adopted!

The Enclave part one

2010-12-05T09:39:00.001-05:00

During our Junior and Senior years of university, Mir and I lived together in an apartment we named the Enclave. These are the stories of how the Enclave tried to kill us. More than once.

We acquired the apartment through blind luck. Mir was planning on living with some other girls, I was...honestly I don't remember what my plan was. I don't think I had one. Nevertheless, when it all came together there weren't a lot of places left in Evanston. We checked out a two-bedroom place and it seemed pretty decent. Unfortunately, there were two dudes who also wanted the apartment. We considered offering sexual favours, but LEONARD! our landlord suggested a coin toss, the first, last and only positive contribution to our welfare he ever made.

LEONARD! I should add, was insane. He'd had a few strokes, which made us sympathetic until we were assured by reliable sources that he had been insane long before that. His emails were always in all caps so no matter what he was saying, important rent info, or spam he was forwarding, seemed like a psychotic drill sergeant bellowing over the interwebs. He liked to show up, unannounced, often with his massive dog in tow. At least, I think it was a dog. This thing was so huge. I mean, it was really fucking big. It looked a lot like this:

I think LEONARD! used to ride it like a pony. A bear pony.

But we didn't know any of that at the time. All we knew was that we'd called tails, and we'd won. We had a place to live! Our college experience was going to be amazing! We were like real adults!

The apartment we'd seen was not the one we were actually getting, and the one we got was not like the one we'd seen at all. For starters, the bedroom Mir was getting didn't have a proper wall. Two of the four walls stopped a good two inches from the ceiling. Soundproof, this apartment was not. Safe, it was not either.

We have shockingly few pictures of the Enclave, mostly because it was a pit of filth; only partially our fault, but here's your setup:

The apartment had a tiny little bathroom with tiles that wouldn't scrub clean no matter how you tried (and I did try). A sink, usually stained from hair-dye. Tub with shower attachment, also stained various colours. A toilet where no matter what we did, the chain broke so you had to stick your hand into the tank to flush. And a weirdass radiator that we kept books on.

Mirmir and I: No eyebrows.

If you were thinking we looked a little bit like fetuses, you'd be correct. And if you were wondering where those scars on my face come from, it was from my piranha wrestling days. The reason we did this to ourselves was simple.

Mir: My halloween costume involves a blonde wig. I'm going to look like an idiot.
Bess: Pluck your eyebrows off.
Mir: What a fantastic notion!

So she plucked them off.

Mir: Wait, why are you plucking your eyebrows off?
Bess: ...
Mir: ...
Bess: Hey look! No eyebrows!
Mir: YAY!

See, totally logical, right?

Mir was working, sans eyebrows, down in the deli below us. I was going to take a shower and go to class. It was simple enough. Go in, lock the door, open the window to let out the steam, shower.

The problem came when I tried to leave. The bathroom door jammed - a combination of the wood sticking and the lock refusing to budge - trapping me inside the tiny little room, without eyebrows, in nothing but a towel. We always kept books in the bathroom, but I'd read them all, and Mir wasn't due back for hours. Plus, you know, class.

So I did what any self-respecting, eyebrowless, damsel in distress would do, I took the doorknob apart fiddled around with that and when nothing happened I went over to the bathroom window and hollered for help.

Unfortunately, the bathroom window didn't look out onto a street. Instead, it opened into a sort of air shaft. I have a very loud voice and put it to good use. The building, as I've mentioned, wasn't exactly structurally sound, so I figured sooner or later, someone would hear me.

I must have been shouting for about an hour, going from "Hello! Can someone help me! I'm trapped!" to "I'm naked, it won't take very long." Finally there was a knock on the front door and the voice of a neighbour called out, "Hey, are you okay in there? You've been shouting for a while."

Nice.

I told him to run to the deli and get Mir. According to Mir he shoved through the lunch crowd and in a voice usually reserved for shouting "is there a doctor in the house" asked for her. "Something's wrong with your roommate!" he said vaguely and they ran up to the apartment where I was sitting, probably reading one of the books, eyebrowless, bored, and a little cold.

"Bathroom door's stuck," I casually informed them, when they got into the Enclave.

I stepped into the tub and the neighbour shouldered the door open. I guess I should also mention that at the time I was extremely pale, and my hair at the time was dyed black, dead straight, with a wee little fringe. I looked like a fetus cancer patient. Maybe that's why the neighbour just fled the scene right afterward without further comment.

"We'll have to put up a sign for the party," I said, checking the time and pleased to see I'd still make it to class if I hurried. "Thanks for the help."

"You were by yourself," Mir said. "Why the hell did you lock the door?"

I had no answer, but really, I don't think I ought to be held accountable by someone who let me take a picture of her while she had underwear on her head and pencils in her nose:

Standard Steampunk Outfits and Accessories, and Why I Think They're Great, No Matter What the Self-Declared Arbiters of All Things Steam May Say

2010-11-29T13:28:00.008-05:00

We all know I love steampunk, right? Yes. Good. I love steampunk. Have done since sometime in 2005 or 2006 when Bess and I realized that our tendency to wear corsets could be developed beyond goth. And now that Bess has gotten all bloggy about a steampunk show (you all read that, right? If not, shame on you. Go read it. We'll wait.) I figured it was time for me to start opining about steampunk as a subculture, because there have been a few things said of late that have, frankly, bugged me.

There are people who like to make rules about steampunk; what it is, and what it is not. I do not tend to like these sort of rules, in steampunk or any other subculture. I like to take a lot of things from the 19th century, but rigid rules of social structure and formalized etiquette do not make the list (along with imperialism, racism, sexism, and really effed up attitudes about sex. Those things need no revival. I am, however, all for bustles, gin, and penny dreadfuls.). Steampunk is, by its very nature, a creative, fantastical, individualistic subculture, where everyone is free to express themselves to the limits of their imaginations.

So when I see people saying things like "there needs to be less brown in steampunk," or "don't wear goggles or gears or mechanisms unless they serve a practical function" I take exception. First of all, I don't think there's any reason for anyone to be laying out these sort of rules. The type of rules steampunk needs are the rules of common decency and the rules of good use of history, such as "if your costume hearkens back to an historical era that involves imperialism and/or genocide, be sensitive to how you portray the nations that committed said crimes." Another good "rule," which I put in quotes because I don't think of them as rules so much as statements of the obvious regarding how kind, intelligent people ought to behave, might be "welcome any and all cultural backgrounds into steampunk, and support the use of said diverse backgrounds to keep steampunk interesting." These are "rules" that I feel are designed to make steampunk more inclusive, since to me, that's one of the most important things any subculture can do; be open to anyone with the desire to be a part of it. Telling people what they should and should not wear, based on what is seen to be a cliche, is, I think, totally counter to that. Part of the reason I wanted to write this article was to say that, yeah, you can dress however you want, especially newcomers to steampunk, and that you shouldn't be afraid of the disapproval of those who would tell you you're doing it wrong. This is steampunk. Bar hurting people's feelings or making them feel uncomfortable around you, there is no doing it wrong.

Beyond that, I actually disagree quite strongly with three of the "cliches" that these self-declared experts tend to argue against. There are three that I hear often, people complaining about things that are "overdone" and silly in steampunk fashion. I shall now address them, one by one. Like a well-oiled clockwork-driven issue-addressing machine!

1) Steampunks wear too much brown.

There are a couple of reasons for all the brown in steampunk, and all of them are good ones. The first, as I see it, is that brown is actually a very practical color. If you have brown in your wardrobe, one brown matches with any and all other browns, including leather, and the beloved brass and copper of steampunk jewelry and accessories. It's also practical in that it doesn't show dirt, which is a boon to all those steampunks whose characters, personas, costumes, etc are based around a person who might well get dirty in their line of work, such as a mechanic, an aviator, a soldier, an explorer, or a naturalist.

Then there's the fact that, let's be honest here, a lot of steampunks are fans of Joss Whedon. And we all know what it means if your coat is brown. (It was on sale.)

The last reason for brown, and this is the one I think is really interesting, is that it evokes the sepia-tint with which people think of the era. Some self-declared experts actually use this to counter the idea of wearing brown, since the brown comes, not from the actual past, but from modern perceptions of the past. To that I say EXACTLY. Steampunk is, or can be, largely about the way we in the now view and think about the past. If people want to turn themselves into living, breathing sepia-tinted photographs, then so be it! I think it's splendid.

That's not to say that people shouldn't wear colors besides brown, of course. I'm not in the business of telling people not to do things. And I love bright colors, bring them on! But no one should be made to feel unoriginal or wrong for wearing earth tones.

2.) Goggles. What's with all the goggles?

This is another complaint the self-declared experts will make. They see goggles as overdone or cliched, and especially object to goggles that do not "fit" with the outfit in a practical way, especially ones that would be difficult to actually use, such as goggles placed on the brim of a top hat.

Ok, first of all, whoever said fashion had to remain practical? Think about platform shoes. They were invented to keep feet and clothing up out of the mud and puddles on rainy days. But they developed into a fashion unto themselves, and I doubt you'd criticize someone for wearing platforms when the weather is dry. Or fur-lining to clothes, which was obviously developed for warmth, but quickly became a fashion item as well, going so far as to include artificial fur that is not necessarily warm, but kept there for the look of it. Let us suppose, then, that in our steampunk universe, goggles became ubiquitous because they were worn by airship pilots and passengers. Let us then further suppose that even people who were not planning to enter an airship that day wore goggles anyway, to achieve the popular look, or to imitate those rich, lucky, or daring enough, to fly. Voila, a fashion, as impractical as any other, but one that implies a richness and complexity to the culture in which that fashion developed. If we're only going to wear things that have a practical purpose, fashion is going to get boring quickly.

3) Gears and mechanisms that don't do anything.

A lot of people complain about this, as though there's some fundamental lie being perpetrated when people, say, stick gears on a garment without those gears actually moving anything. To this, I repeat what I said in the previous paragraph, but add something else.

Gears are beautiful, as are many other parts of clock work mechanisms. Is it so unrealistic to suppose that a person in a steampunk world who worked with gears on a daily basis might look at them, find them beautiful, and so fashion them into jewelry or incorporate them into decorations for their clothes? Sailors do that, incorporating decorative knots that serve no real purpose into bracelets, ornamentation for tools, even furniture. Every profession in the world can do it, from hunters making necklaces out of bear teeth to film actors, who started wearing sunglasses (originally adopted to protect their eyes from bright studio lights) off the set and created a new fashion. I don't see anything wrong with functionless gears; like the goggles, it implies a culture that cares about aesthetics as well as practicality. Plus, they look awesome. Yeah, I'm that shallow. This is a discussion about fashion; I can be shallow if I want.

Really though, it's less about justifying these "cliches," though I hope I have done that, than it is about saying "look, there's no point behaving as though people doing the 'standard' costume are doing something wrong. If that's the look they like, let them like it, and if they want to develop from there, that's great too." Steampunk should be about maximizing fun for all involved, and I don't see how looking down our noses (through our monocles) at newbies or people who wear the standard uniform, is fun for anyone.

Riese: It's a tragedy alright

2010-11-28T12:42:00.000-05:00

Next time Mir and I promise to review something that we actually liked. In lieu of that, have some media recs:
the Madagascar penguin shorts and TV show. Very Pinky and the Brain sort of adventures.
Red. Helen Mirrin alone is worth the price of admission.
Lesbian Vampire Hunters. Exactly what it sounds like. More comedy than horror.
This guy reading and reviewing Twilight
This review of the movie Queen of the Damned - I've made people sit through the movie just so they can read this review.

And now on to the main event. I don't know if anyone has tuned in to the new webseries gone SyFy show 'Riese: Kingdom Falling' but if you haven't, let me spare you the bother.

I should also mention that as I write this I'm suffering from Drug-Induced Esophagitis which is exactly nine kinds of fresh hell. It's not making me feel kind, but in my defense I was exactly this vitriolic when I first saw this show and I was fine then.

Riese has been lauded as the first steampunk series, a triumph of the underdog web-based media gone big, brilliant costuming and characters, creative and new etc. etc.. I don't know what show the reviewers were watching when they said it was "like a Shakespearean Tragedy" but I suspect they were either told what to say by the network, or AA, and I say this with love, might be in order.

I could spend a very long time criticizing literally everything about it from the lacklustre attempt at steampunk costuming and the illogical set dressing choices, to the badly choreographed fighting with idiotic weapons and godawful acting. *

Actually, I'm not going to criticize the acting because to do so wouldn't be fair. Not because any of it is, by any stretch of the imagination, good, but because I don't think it's humanly possible to deliver the dialogue in a way that is anything less than terrible.

And there's the main problem of Riese. The writing.

I had the sinking feeling that things were going to go bad when we were introduced to the world Riese, our heroine, lives in by Amanda Tapping's voice over (ATVO) explaining that an evil regime, The Sect, has taken over and the princess of the old regime pulled an Anastasia and survived the assassination of her family. She's been on the run ever since. For ten years The Sect has been out looking for her. The usual nonsense.

A good voice over needs to have a distinctive voice delivering it. I love Amanda Tapping, but her voice isn't all that interesting to listen to on its own. A good voice over also tells the audience something they don't already know. See Dexter and Dead Like Me for well done examples of VO. A bad VO needlessly prattles on to the point where you sort of stop listening, or redundantly explains things that the audience just saw.

The ATVO does both. About halfway through the opening VO I'd started tuning out. Too much set up, explainers and backstory for what is essentially one of the most stock fantasy set-ups out there was so not necessary. It threw out every notion of "show, don't tell" and thumbed its nose at them. This voice over was the voice over that would. Not. Die.

You'd think that with steampunk elements a clever worldbuilding would be necessary, but no. Evil empire chases sole survivor of old empire. Got it. You might need to explain the tech if the world made any coherent sense, but it doesn't, so just file it under ill-conceived fantasy and you don't need any further explainers.

I mean, there were literally moments where there'd be flashbacks of wee!Riese running little red riding hood style through the forest with her pet wolf (I wish I was making this up) while the ATVO explained that she had fled into the woods with only her pet wolf for company. And when we went back to PresentDay!Riese looking angsty, the ATVO would promptly inform everyone that Riese was gripped by memories of that sad day.

I KNOW! I WAS JUST THERE!

Let me summarize the plot.

The ev0l gummint - when not failing to track Riese down (and the ATVO said she'd been hiding out in the same woods for ten years so that is some feeble-ass tracking) are taking away babies for some unnamed nefarious purpose and storing them in crates (live babies, mind you) while a dude who looks like he's wearing a ski mask, cycling sunglasses and has cogs stuck all over him Darth Vaders (complete with superstrength and asthma) at minions, and Riese is stabbed in the side by the two guys who managed to find her, though neither of them manage to put a crossbow bolt through the wolf: Fenrir.

I know.

Riese winds up in a hospital being all mostly naked and bandaged. She puts her shit back on and bumps into a woman screaming blue murder that someone's stolen her child while a blatantly evil doctor is all like, "What? Taking babies? Noooo, everything's fine. Nothing to see. Move it along princess. I mean. Uh, I have no idea who you are and won't turn you in or anything."

He knows who she is because of a royal brand on her shoulder. Now, call me crazy, but wouldn't you, oh, I don't know, ALTER THE BRAND so people couldn't ID you? It's been ten years, they'd have no idea what she looks like.

She decides to save this one specific baby, since she can't help them all, and the ATVO helpfully informs us that Riese decided she would help save this one woman's baby because even if she couldn't help everyone, she could at least save this one.

Drinking for ATVO redundancy alone is likely to give you alcohol poisoning, never mind for anything else.

I started drinking to make the ATVO more tolerable. It didn't help. It just made me louder about my unhappiness.

There's also a map. A map that looks like it's been stolen from Tolkien and then had all the names replaced with things like Asgard, Eleysia, and Hobbitton, I mean, uh...anyway, you get the picture. You could also drink every time the map shows up and be hammered by the time you've watched, eh, maybe a part and a half. It's usually accompanied by the ATVO and the camera roves around for no good reason for a few seconds before going back to the actual characters, who are doing stuff.

Like the Ev0l Empress, standing around with a series of increasingly ridiculous circlets, reminding everyone that she is their empress and they will remember their place.

I cannot stress how bad the dialogue is, either. I mean, we're talking action movie trailer levels of recycled blather. It's like they're not even saying anything at all.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a steampunk series online or on tv. This though? This is not it. Yeah, the production values are high for a web series, but all the fancy shmancy camera angles and sets stolen from Xena:the Vancouver Edition don't make it a good show. It could have been saved by a decent plotline, or even interesting characters.

Riese has no personality, just an ATVO following her around like a bad smell and like I said, the plot is rehashed fantasy nonsense. I couldn't tell you the name of a single secondary character but I could tell you their type: evil doctor, henchman, head henchman etc. Stock Characters R Us.

So, in conclusion, until Riese does something about its disregard for the fundamental rules of good writing, I'll be giving it a miss and getting my steampunk fix from the Toronto Steampunk Society.

* In regards to the costuming: It's lazy work that hasn't been properly thought out, or executed. I know it's a genre attached to fantasy and sci-fi, but there ought to be internal logic. Why does duder's "mechanical" arm have no mechanics, only decorative gears? Why should I be afraid of a villain with no peripheral vision and two easily blockable airholes? What's with the stupid-ass blades? What's wrong with normal knives? Why does the Evil Empire not have a proper uniform? Why are there plastic buttons on things? WTF is up with Riese's makeup?

Old Adventure: In Which there are Russians, Hats, and Bad Choices

2010-11-22T21:09:00.000-05:00

Hi, MirMir here. We've realized that some lighthearted comments made here could be construed as encouraging you to click on ads just to give us money. This was not our intention; those statements, in keeping with the humerousness of this blog, were meant as jokes. Click on ads only if you are interested in the products advertised.

It's also been brought to my attention that all the best stories start with the phrase "so, no shit, there I was...."

So, no shit, there I was in Halifax with a bunch of tall ship sailors. I say a bunch of tall ship sailors. It was almost all the tall ship sailors in the world. There was a big festival happening, and me and my shipmates had been sailin' on up the East Coast, hanging out in various cities with other tall ship sailors from all these awesome ships. We'd been in Boston, where we listened to a lot of amazing accents of the "mah boy's wicked smaht" variety, I had an hour long conversation with three French sailors who spoke French, Spanish, and worse English than I spoke Spanish, and me and some shipmates got a ride across the harbor from a Boston police boat, and we didn't even have to commit a crime or be arrested! And now we were in Halifax, and so were all these other sailors. Clearly, a party was about to start.

For a while, we just ran around, going to Irish pubs and listening to eight hundred thousand bajillion and five (no really, I counted) live renditions of Barrett's Privateers. That's a really fun song, and tall ship sailors love it. So do drunk Haligonians (that is a real word, which I did not make up I swear. That is what you call a person from Halifax. Google it if you don't believe me, and I know you don't believe me, because Haligonian sounds goddamn ridiculous), probably for the same reason: you get to yell the words "GODDAMN THEM ALL!" real loud at the beginning of every chorus. And since the chorus occurs roughly forty thousand times per rendition of the song, that's a lot of yelling. It's pretty amazing, and about as Canadian as you can get without humping a maple tree. Good times. But eventually, we grew a-weary of Irish pubs, Barrett's Privateers, and poutine. I know it sounds hard to believe, but it happened. So anyway, when we heard we were all being invited to a massive tall ship sailor reception, hosted by the city of Halifax itself, (or possibly just some do-gooding Haligonians, I don't remember,) we were stoked.

This party was being held in a warehouse. Or like, convention space. It was hard to tell what the space was; it was so damn full of sailors you couldn't see it. You also couldn't see the stage, where the Halifax folk who'd invited us there were offering us various performances to show off the culture of Halifax. There was a First Nations tribal dance going on when I first came in, and then eventually it was a gospel choir. It was hard to take note of all of that though, because, and this is important, there was alcohol at this party. There was free alcohol, for sailors, at this party.

Think for a second about that. Sailors, plus free alcohol. I mean, we were already excited for this party. We'd showered for this party. And now there was free beer? I swear my second mate wept real tears of joy. I recall wondering if Halifax knew what it was getting into. You had sailors here from dozens of ships, from a whole bunch of different countries, and you were going to get them drunk and then ask them to politely watch your cultural performances? I was skeptical that this could end in anything either than the sort of thing you want to describe as "shenanigans," but which the police are way more likely to describe as "six months with good behavior. I mean behaviour. I forgot I was Canadian for a second." My shipmates dove right in to the free alcohol, as well they should have, but I was distracted. I was distracted, you see, by the Russian navy.

The Russian navy was there in Halifax, with a magnificent ship called the Kruzenstern (probably misspelled, but I do NOT look things up for these articles; that would be putting way too much effort in, or at least, admitting to myself that I'm already putting to much effort in), which the navy uses for sail training. So the ship brought with it a few hundred cadets, and these cadets were at the party, in uniform.

Look, I'll be honest with you. Most tall ship sailors do not dress well. Every tall ship has a rag bin, where you put old clothes to tear up and use as paint rags, and every sailor owns at least one garment that they rescued from the rag bin, sometimes after it had been used to mop up spilled paint. Understand that a garment has to be pretty weak before a sailor will chuck it in the rag bin, and then think about the fact that even then, some other sailor will more than likely still want to wear it. And no sailor will ever put ANYTHING made by the Carhart company in a rag bin, because those are regarded as being good forever, even after they are no longer recognizable, by a reasonable person, as clothing. Your average hobo is better dressed than your average tall ship sailor. Tall ship sailors use sail thread to repair their clothes, which considering sail thread is about as thick as that stuff you used to make key chains out of when you were a kid, and a kind of bone-white that just screams "hey, look at the stitching on this otherwise black garment" means their clothes look like they died, were buried, and then resurrected by a Hammer Horror mad scientist. I include myself fully in these generalizations. Most of my shirts at the time had big white swatches of bleach damage from cleaning ships' heads with bleach and being a clumsy oaf. My best pants had blood on them from when I cut my hand and bled all over everything. You'd think that would have meant they were no longer my best pants, but you'd be wrong. You could be forgiven for being wrong, though, because you've never seen my second best pants, which were an ungodly mess of sail-thread stitches trying to replace worn-out knees. My newest-looking clothes were my bandanas, and even those were getting sun-faded, and would, at some point, be used as impromptu bandages, because that's a tall ship sailor's life.

And we'd all put on our nice clothes for this party, which is to say, that we were all wearing clothes that you would probably hesitate before donating to the Salvation Army, not because you wanted to keep them, but because you couldn't imagine anyone wanting these clothes. We probably had enough salt in the fabric of our clothes to supply an average family's table for a year, and enough other unknowable substances to ensure that that family would not, in any way, want that salt.

And the Russian cadets were in uniform. Crisp, clean, identical uniforms. They would have put us to shame, if it hadn't been for their hats. I will now attempt to describe these hats.

They were amazing. Big, wide, white flat tops, with little shiny brims, and a big...what do you call that front part of the hat where you can have comically large medallions? Well, that. They were awesomely over the top military dress caps. They were like parodies of Donald Duck's hat. And, this is important, the main adjective I would apply to them is "stealable." They looked stealable as fuck.

I have been known to steal hats in the past. It's something I do, not usually with malicious intent, but just because sometimes I feel compelled to do so. My kleptomania is highly specific; it applies only to hats, and then, only to fucking outrageous hats, not to your lame little Williamsburg-hipster fedora. I have a problem, I'm aware of that. Anyway, when I saw these hats, I immediately turned to my shipmate, who was downing a free beer like it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and said "I am going to steal the hell out of one of those hats." He offered me his full support, because what are shipmates for?

Understand, I was sober. I was sober for the entire theft, and while I wouldn't say I stand by my actions, it's not like I have anyone but myself to blame for them. I sidled over to a table where a hat had been left unattended, and calmly picked it up and walked away, back to my shipmates, who had drunk enough now to be dancing. They were delighted with the hat, and we all enjoyed putting it on our heads, because this was a fucking amazing hat. Then I set it down with our stuff, and forgot about it.

Now, time-jump to quite a few hours and some free alcohol later. The word sober, I think it's fair to say, no longer applied at this point. We were leaving, and I had put the hat back on my head, because, well, it seemed like the thing to do. We had not got twenty yards from the door (or meters; this was Canada), when a guy came over to talk to us.

This guy was not wearing a uniform, but neither was he dressed like a tall ship sailor/like a rag bin. He was dressed like a real person, which is a whole other thing. He was 11 feet all. He was made of muscles. He was smoking a cigarette.

He stood about a half inch away from me, leaned down so that his face was almost level with mine, so that his LIT CIGARETTE was about a 16th of an inch from my EYE, and said, in a Russian accent that could float rocks, "Maybe. You geev us. Hat. Back. Now?"

I looked at him. I had had some free alcohol, so I'm not sure this next part was the best decision I've ever made, but I said, "I don't know about that."

Meanwhile, one of my (drunker than me) shipmates, who was leaning on the first mate for support behind me, said, in perhaps the most ill-advised imitation of someone's accent EVER, "eef vee no geev hat back, ve haff nuclear var?"

The Russian giant pretended not to hear him, which, in retrospect, makes him probably the nicest Russian giant in history. All in all, I can't really find fault with anything he did here, except maybe the cigarette. I take exception to the cigarette. "Maybe," he repeated. "You geev us. Hat. Back." He explained, in broken, menacing-as-hell-English, that the cadet whose hat it was needed it for muster tomorrow.

I pointed out that this would then be a valuable lesson for him about not leaving his hat lying around. I was actually ready to cave out of sympathy for the cadet anyway, when some drunk drunked up to me and drunkenly pointed out the very real possibility that, and I quote "if that cadet doesn't have his hat tomorrow when they muster, they'll probably shoot his entire family." I thought about that for a second. All of a sudden, it seemed not just plausible, but quite likely. I'm not sure why. Possibly the hat was influencing my brain, making me extra gullible. I'd been feeling bad for the cadet as it was, and considering giving in just for his sake, but with the threat against his innocent family thrown in, I was powerless. I meekly handed the hat over. The cigarette was removed from proximity to my favorite eyeball. (It was my right one.)

I'd like to stress that it was all compassion, and in no way the lit cigarette in my eye that influenced my actions.

Of course, I quickly realized that the guy's family probably wasn't really at risk. But somehow the threat seemed credible at the time, and in the end I did the right thing, so I guess that's all for the best. Oh, and I got this picture before I ended up geeving hat back:

So that was all well and good, really.

The sad thing is, that hat was by far the best piece of clothing I had on at that moment. I was wearing a tank top, and a skirt repaired with a yard and a half of sail-thread stitches. I looked like a bum. A bum who maybe used to be a goth, because it was that kind of skirt. But from the neck up, I think you'll agree, I looked great.

I Don't Think I Like Mad Men Very Much Anymore: A Review in Rant Form

2010-11-16T16:59:00.001-05:00

(Ok, I know this rant/review is not timely. But it takes a while after the end of a TV season for my opinions to really gel. So, now that they're gelled, here they are.)

I really like history. I really like old things. And I really like TV shows based in an historical period that try to immerse the viewer fully in that setting. I saw them referred to somewhere as "time travel shows," and I think that's a great description. Any show where the era is as much a character as it is a setting, where the director and writers pay attention to everything from what books a character with a certain level of education would be likely to have read to what music they might listen to, to what brand of flour a store would stock. I'm talking here about shows like Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, and Mad Men.

One of the criticisms I hear of this type of show is that they use portraying an era where sexism, homophobia, and racism were rampant and acceptable as an excuse to get away with actually being racist, sexist, homophobic in their casting, writing, and directing. Deadwood, at least, gets away from that criticism quite neatly, which is the topic for another blog entry. Briefly, though, I think Deadwood gets away with it because it actually develops a more diverse cast as the show goes on, and the minority characters, and women, are given just as much of an inner life and character development as the white men. So good for Deadwood! Still in mourning over its untimely termination.

But Mad Men? I always thought Mad Men fell into the same category as Deadwood, at least through seasons one and two. I thought that yeah, they were focusing on the white, upper-middle class executives, but they weren't glorifying them, were they? They were revealing them for the scumbags they were. Sure, a lot of the fanbase seemed to be awfully...nostalgic for the days when you (meaning them, meaning the nostalgic people, meaning straight white men) could sexually harass your secretary over a 10 a.m. scotch, but it was always my view that those people were simply watching the show wrong.

After all, they were setting up all of these side characters who clearly threatened that way of life. Besides all the women considering careers outside the typing pool, the show did set up some black characters. There was Hollis, the African-American elevator operator, who, while mostly silent, helped in the extremely deserved public humiliation of Roger Sterling, making him vomit oysters and martinis all over Nixon's campaign manager. Sadly, that was about all he did, but they kept showing him, and I think initially the show did a nice job of making the viewer aware of Hollis, and aware of how invisible he was to the executives around him. So I had hope for his development, even if I was disappointed that the show never attempted to make him a viewpoint character at all. How hard would it have been to see what his home life was like, what made him tick as a person? We got that with Pete Campbell. We got it with Sal, eventually. But not Hollis. I was disappointed.

Then there was Rachel, the Jewish business woman, who awesomely put out her cigarette in the trayf shrimp cocktail a clueless (or just hostile) Sterling Cooper served at their first meeting. And of course, Rachel and Peggy were both women in a man's world, striving to be taken seriously, which also looked good for my whole this-world-is-being-threatened-and-that's-a-good-thing theory. Granted, Rachel was gone by the end of the season, and her Jewishness ended up being used more as a metaphor for Don's sense of alienation than anything else. Because a minority character is there to be a metaphor for a rich white man's angst, of course. Later this was mirrored, in an even more egregious example, by the inclusion of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, whose assassination was used solely as a symbol for how Betty and Sally felt about Betty's father's death. That seemed pretty full of fail to me. But there was still Peggy, getting more and more into advertising, and Betty, slipping into madness under the strain of the only way of life she understood, and the season ended with a Bob Dylan song! Surely, the times would be a'changin'?

I thought so, anyway. Season two did start out with Paul Kinsey dating a black woman, and one actively involved in the civil rights movement, no less. Unfortunately, she was gone soon too, after appearing in no more than three or four scenes. As Joan cruelly, but accurately, pointed out, Paul wasn't interested in her, he was interested in the air of liberal bohemianism that dating her gave him. Granted, the three or four scenes she was in were all great. I especially liked the one where she and Paul are fighting in the elevator. Rather, she's trying to have a fight; he's trying to introduce her to Hollis, to show Hollis that he's dating a black woman, and to show Sheila that he's friendly to Hollis. Their reactions are both perfect, with Hollis looking at him as if to say "I'm your elevator operator. Why are you introducing me to your girlfriend?" and Shelia giving him a near identical "he's the elevator operator. Why are you introducing me to him?" look, when of course, they both know exactly why he's doing it. And Sheila refuses to let the fight go, so that instead of impressing Hollis with his colorblindness, Paul gets to stand there while Sheila yells at him for not going down south with her to register voters. Perfect scene, and as sorry as I was to see Sheila go, I was delighted that she dumped Paul's sorry ass.

That left only Carla. Poor, poor Carla. I don't mean the way her character gets treated by the other characters within the show, though there's that, too; I mean the way that the show itself treats her. And this is where I start to call bullshit on Mad Men, really. Carla was clearly an important character in terms of the emotional lives of the Draper family, especially the kids. So why do we as the viewer know nothing about her? It's awful. There was such an opportunity there for an interesting, important African-American character on the show (even if she was in the stereotypical role of maid/nanny) who could have had a rich backstory and inner life, like so many of the white characters. There were hints of something good early on. She subverted a few of the cliches about the African-American maid character in that time and place, like when Betty was having her meltdown, and Carla, after having her sincere offer to talk rejected, gave Betty advice that essentially amounted to "get over whatever's bothering you. It's probably just some bullshit, anyway." It certainly countered the stereotype of the patient, humble servant, who would help Betty deal with her issues, and it offered a glimpse of a character who had a degree of contempt for the people she worked for and the world she worked in. I hoped we might see more of that.

Instead, we got nothing. The show even skipped over the six entire weeks when she was raising the Draper kids without Betty and Don, six weeks that could have shown, not only her relationship with the children (which is what, exactly? She seems to care for Sally, but we don't get a lot else) but her backstory and inner life. We got none of that, and in the final episode of the last season, she was written out of the show entirely. Just like Hollis. Just like Rachel. Just like Sheila.

What's more, the issue of civil rights does get brought up a few times on the show, but always by white people, which is kind of appalling. Don't get me wrong; I like Pete Campbell's "black people are people too because they buy things and that's what makes someone a person," shtick, and the scene where the guy who runs the television company explains that he doesn't want his product to be seen as a "colored television," is really pretty funny, but the fact that there are literally no black characters who discuss civil rights, besides one oblique comment from Hollis, and Carla listening to a MLK speech on the radio, is ridiculous. There is one serious conversation about civil rights in the most recent season, and it's between Peggy and a white man. Later Peggy continues the conversation with some of her colleagues, but she's not taken seriously, and the man who brought it up to her is essentially made to apologize to her. Why oh why couldn't the person who confronted Peggy about representing a racist company have been black? Why does the show present the civil rights movement only through the mouths of white characters? I call fail.

Something you get a lot from the "nostalgia" crowd is the historical accuracy argument. What do you expect? they ask. A black copywriter at SCDP? That would be totally unrealistic! And they're right, in that detail, but that doesn't mean that the show can't give time and sympathy to the black characters. I'm going to compare Mad Men with Deadwood for a moment: no, the Chinese Wu does not run Deadwood, the white Al does. But Wu's concerns in the Chinese part of the camp are given time and shown to be important and complex. The black Hostetler will never be given a major role in the town's politics, but we stick with his story lines and personal anguish. Historical accuracy means Hostetler won't be invited to the meetings of the town elders, but it doesn't mean his life and struggles aren't important to the show. That's what the "historical accuracy" apologists for Mad Men seem to be missing.

But the screwing over of the minority characters on the show is only part of the huge chip developing on my shoulder. The other issue I have is the women, and that's a big issue. I'll leave alone the Joan-abortion plotline, because I actually had mixed feelings about it; on the one hand it would have been nice to see a character actually have an abortion, and I liked that her doctor was practical and non-judgmental about the abortions she had had in the past, and that she didn't seem to feel shame or guilt about them. So in that sense, it was disappointing to see her back down from the abortion. On the other hand, we've known all season that she wanted a baby, so I was all right with her deciding to keep it.

No, my biggest problem, on the female character front, is Betty. I want all viewers of the show to think way back to season one, to the tragic, fragile, utterly constrained and powerless woman that was Betty Draper. Now think forward to the current season, at the contemptible, evil shrew destroying the lives of her children in a million petty, repressive ways. Somewhere along the line, the show asked us to stop sympathizing with Betty.

When Betty's psychiatrist goes behind her back to talk to Don about Betty's problems, he describes her as childlike, a description Don throws in Betty's face the first chance he gets. I remember being angry at him for it, and I don't think I was the only one. Of course she was expressing childish concerns to her psychiatrist! Those were the only concerns that society, her husband, and her upbringing allow her to have. And when she does express real concerns, most memorably when she bluntly says "I think I could be happy if my husband were faithful to me," she's ignored. The viewer is being asked to see the judgment heaped on her by her shrink and her husband as unjust. Yet by the end of the last season, Betty's childishness has become her driving character force, as has her cruelty, alcoholism, and repression, and she's behaving in ways that I don't find consistent with her characterization in season one. We aren't meant to sympathize with her any longer. Essentially, when Don bursts out at her in season one "sometimes I feel like I'm living with a child," an attack he makes because she has acted independently without his say-so, we are meant to feel sorry for her, and feel that he is being unjust, but somehow by the end of the most recent season I feel the show is retroactively trying to say that Don was right, and that it was him we should have felt sorry for.

I'm not defending anything Betty does in the last season. In fact, that's my point. She goes from being a sympathetic character to being an unsympathetic one; from being a victim of the age in which she lives, to a modern-day image of a villain from that age. And the change doesn't seem, to me, to make sense. Why is the woman who took an air rifle to a flock of doves in defense of her children suddenly the woman threatening to cut her daughter's fingers off as punishment for masturbation? In an earlier season, I think we would have seen more of Betty's side of things in that masturbation drama; after all, she's been known to enjoy some alone time with vibrating household appliances herself. Instead, we get her behaving like a vindictive Puritan, and saying that she feels her daughter masturbated "to punish me[Betty]." I just don't see that woman as the same as the one we met in the first season, and any development she's had is hidden. Or at least, I'm not seeing it. I see inconsistent characterization used to demonize someone I used to sympathize with. By the end of the most recent season, we're no longer able to sympathize with her; Don has become the "good" parent. This destruction of the audience's sympathy for Betty is, I think, a serious problem. It puts us in Don's shoes, and I never thought we were supposed to be there.

I don't know if I've been watching the show wrong all along. I'd have to do a rewatch to tell you that. But I do know that the last season added up disturbingly well with the "nostalgic" viewership idea. I don't like that idea one bit. I still enjoy the show, I must admit; Roger Sterling's bon mots are as brilliant as ever, but I liked them a lot more when I didn't feel like he was the figure we were meant to be sympathizing with. The hints of change to come on Mad Men have become something the viewer is asked to see with the same apprehension that Don and Roger might have, instead of the anticipation of something better that Peggy, or Sheila would probably feel. And that's exactly the problem. A show that asks us to mourn for a bygone era of segregation, and unapologetic, institutionalized racism and sexism, is not the show I thought I was watching. I thought I was watching a warts-and-all view of an often romanticized "simpler time." Instead, I think I may be watching that romanticization all over again. By getting rid of diversity in the cast, and removing sympathy for Betty, the show's becoming as racist and sexist as the era it depicts.

One of Mad Men's most memorably brilliant scenes was the in The Wheel, where Don breaks our hearts in his pitch for the Carousel. The theme of his pitch is nostalgia, and the complicated, painful feeling that word represents. It was a gorgeously written, acted, and shot scene. This season, Don, attempting to pitch an ad campaign, drunkenly slurs "I was thinking about...nostalgia." The moment, for me, and probably for many other viewers, was painful; a mockery of that so-moving scene from season one. In many ways, the entirety of the most recent season felt that way to me; a show that had a lot of promise in terms of making an interesting statement on an era, becoming just another piece of nostalgia for a time that doesn't need or deserve it.

I'll add, as post script, that even upon reflection, Deadwood passes the romanticism test quite handily as well. It set out to deromanticize an era, and it did it. I intend to write something one of these days on the way race plays out on Deadwood, because I think it's fascinating. And a lot less rage-inducing than Mad Men.

Choose Your Own Adventure

2010-11-09T06:07:00.000-05:00

There are things you need to understand about this epic quest.

A. Mirmir and I have precious few requirements for any given small town. It pretty much has to have two things. 1) a bed we can sleep in 2) a bar. The bar is crucial because it allows us to interact with Interesting Locals. Wisconsin's problem was not that it didn't have a bar; Wisconsin is actually made of bars, and small diners. The problem was that there was only one bar within walking distance (see the previous post about 'Sconsonite's reactions to not drunk driving...)

B. When we walked to this one bar of an evening it was closed. We later found out it was closed because we caved and drove elsewhere where we found the owner of that first bar, drinking in the second bar. He promised it would be open the next night.

C. When I say this bar was within walking distance, that means that it was physically possible to get there on foot. Of course, that actually applies to anywhere in the Americas, assuming that we have enough time and want beer badly enough. I have no idea how far a walk it was, but the important part is that it was through the woods, in the pitch black, with no flashlight, during "spring break" which means "in the middle of winter."

The road looked a lot like this:

Except colder.

Getting there was thankfully not difficult. We were effervescent with the thoughts of spending an evening getting to know our new friends. Sure enough the owner was there, his regulars, and the owner of the bar we had driven to the night before. The regulars were the same as the guys from that other bar, plus one tired-looking woman and two kids who played a round of pool and then got the hell out of there.

What happened next, you must remember, is still not the adventure. We bought drinks, tried to tip and were told that this wasn't the big city. We bought second drinks, were told again not to tip and given free shots.

McGuillicutties tastes like a tictac.

Not only can you not taste or feel the liquor until it's far, FAR too late, but mint is my catnip. I will do things after eating a box of tictacs that even the least sober person in the room wouldn't.

But we were having a great time. We'd got more free shots than was sensible, played some Yahtzee, liar's dice type game, and learned that it's pronounced 'Sconsin, not Wisconsin.

And then the dude next to me opened his mouth. What came out was, to my recollection, "blah blah racist, blah blah homophobic, blah blah blah douchecakes." Everyone fell silent. The juke box screeched to a halt. Again. Obviously 'Sconsin has some wiring problems. Mirmir cringed down in her seat. He said something shitty about women, Jews, and lesbians.

Normally I'm the least confrontational of the Hive mind. But I was full of mint! And shots! And mint!

I told the guy to step off and when he started getting shitty I told him that tattooing the names of his kids on him did not make him a good father, that it was a Thursday night and maybe, instead of sitting in a bar insulting strangers, right after telling them how much he loved his kids he never saw, he might want to sober up, go home and actually be a dad.

One of us was going to have to leave.

It was him.

The owner threw him out and apologized for the guy. He seemed very concerned that we might think 'Sconsin was not an awesome place to be. We drank more shots and forgot all about it. Until it was time to leave the bar.

It was brought to our attention that asshole redneck guy might not have gone home. He might, possibly, maybe, be hanging around outside the bar waiting to kill us. There were not, I remind you, any lights about two feet past the bar. And outside the bar was a field. A dark, frozen, crappy field. Also, by "brought to our attention" I mean that the guys in the bar were like, "So, he might not have left and might, possibly, maybe be hanging around outside waiting. One of us should give you a ride home. Just, you know, to be safe."

Our new friends offered us a ride home. This would have been awesome if they hadn't been drunker than we were. Thus the Choose Your Own Adventure part of the evening began.

We decided not to take a ride from a drunk driver and turned to the appropriate page. And by page I mean staggering along the last stretch of road that had a light, next to that frozen, empty field as a car slowly pulled up behind us. It rattled. It clanked. It rumbled ominously towards us.

We squinted into the headlights, blinded, and made out a car built of rust and duct tape. If an angry racist dickbag was going to drive a car, it would likely be this one. This was a car that could get cast on a procedural drama as "the creepy car."

Mirmir remarked how this was going to be a really pants way to die. I agreed mournfully and prepared to run in a zig zag way in order to better dodge any bullets and or arrows that came out of the car (there's a lot of hunting in 'Sconsin). Of course, considering I was already weaving, in retrospect, that might have made me go in a straight line...

But it wasn't the angry redneck! It was one of our friends asking us if we were sure we didn't want a ride. He was fine to drive! Really! He had, however, been drunk when we'd arrived at the bar, and had downed a twelve pack during our time there.

We hadn't yet peed our pants from fear, or actually been shot, so we declined. Death by crappy car versus a tree/deer/veering off the road seemed more likely. We shuffled back off into the night.

So there we were, MirMir and I, headed home to the cabin. "What if there's a bear?" I asked nervously for approximately the eight zillionth time. "Bears can climb trees." The problem that I could see wasn't that bears could climb trees exactly, but that I sure as hell couldn't.

I'm not sure why I suddenly became so concerned about being attacked by a bear, but the conversation continued a lot like this.

Mir: I don't want to die from a hate crime!
Bess: Bears wake up about this time of year right?
Mir: I mean, a ditch, in 'Sconsin? It's not even an awesome death.
Bess: If I clap my hands and back away will that annoy a local bear or will it run away?
Mir: What?
Bess: BEARS!
Mir: THERE ARE NO BEARS!
Bess: But what if there are bears!

We decided this would make an awesome part to the Choose Your Own Adventure. You're on the road and a racist douche attacks you. Also there's a bear.

Do you
a) run away from the racist douche and get eaten by the bear [turn to page 6]
b) run away from the bear and get shot by the racist douche [turn to page 27]
c) drop flat and let the racist douche shoot the bear, thus enraging the bear which will, hopefully, maul the racist douche. [page 13]

Obviously, if this happened we were going to lie like rugs. Or is that lay? Whatever, flatness would occur.

Would we then
a) call 911 [page 9]
b) call animal control [page 31]
c) wait until the bear mauled the racist douche and then call animal control and tell them that there was an injured bear that needed aid. [page 29]

This, I'll admit, is maybe not as cool as some of the CYOA I read as a kid since there were no aliens, spies and had the potential to end in a mauling or hate crime.

You may have guessed: we made it back to the cabin without any of the above occurring. Just in time to take a turn too fast the next day and wind up on a quest for shitty pie. Huzzah.

Mirmir: You know, I think the Blair Witch might have something to do with why the woods were creepy. Even though neither of us have seen it. Still.

Bess: You don't think it had something to do with the redneck bear killer?

Mirmir: But there was no redneck bear killer.

Bess: BUT WHAT IF THERE ARE BEARS?!

An Old Adventure: In Which There is a Farmer, a Lot of Snow, and Some Crappy Pie

2010-11-08T14:49:00.001-05:00

I realize it's been a while since this blog was active, but I miss it, so I thought I'd get it back in gear. Bess and I can post old and new adventures, I figure, and thus both enliven your existence and give us something to do with our day.

This tale both begins and ends with a Flogging Molly song. The song is Between a Man and a Woman, off the album Float. Now, I was walking around today, listening to Float, when I realized I always skip over that song. I wondered why. The song, for some reason, made me feel vaguely embarrassed. Could it be the heteronormative nature of the title and lyrics? No, that wasn't it. The fact that although a fairly decent song it's not the best one on the album by a long shot? No, that wasn't it either. And then it came to me. This story will take us back to Wisconsin, and to the year 2008.

Bess and I had decided that, for spring break 2008, we would go up to my grandparents' cottage in rural Wisconsin. The reason that my grandparents have a cottage in rural Wisconsin is that they are Czech, and Czechs love two things almost as much as they love beer: having a cottage by a lake, which they equate with having basically all you want in life, and forests of pine trees planted in straight rows. I can't explain that second part, but Czechs can't get enough of those, and Wisconsin has tons. Anyway, I know spring break in a cottage sounds debauched and potentially MTVish, but that wasn't the plan. The plan was for us to lock ourselves up and write. And drink too much, and watch Doctor Who. So basically exactly what we were doing while in school, but with less internet access. We accomplished all the goals admirably.

(We actually got a lot of good work done. An odd side effect of the no-internet thing, though, was that when I, as I habitually do, awoke one to two hours before Bess, instead of going online, I would go out into the kitchen, sit by the window, and read a book. For some reason, I was reading Fanny Hill, just so I could say I had. This meant that most mornings Bess would lurch out of her room to find me sitting at the kitchen table, book open in front of me, whereupon I would greet her by saying "you will not believe how the narrator just described a penis. It's goddamn ridiculous." I can think of worse ways to wake up, but not more surreal ones. Yeah, that was our spring break. What was yours like?)

It was all going pretty well. We actually had a number of adventures in Wisconsin, but I'm only going to tell you about one right now. Anyway, we had driven into town one gray Sunday. I don't know why. Probably to buy food or liquor. Sadly, nothing was open. Feeling defeated, we headed home. As we were driving back along the snowy roads, the Flogging Molly album Float, which had been a source of much inspiration for us that Spring Break Week, was playing on the stereo. I went to round a corner.

I should stress here that I was not drunk. I am stressing this, not because I EVER drive drunk (I do not) but because I think it made me exceptional as far as Wisconsin drivers are concerned. A few nights earlier we had been in a bar, and when I turned down an offer of a second beer since I was driving us home, the entire bar stopped talking and just STARED at us like we were insane. It was just like a movie; the music on the jukebox even came to a comical, screeching-record halt mid verse.

The guy who'd offered the drink said "So? There are no cops out there."

"No..." I said. "But neither are there streetlights. And there are trees. And deer. And ice on the roads." He was not convinced, and he drove home after about 12 beers and as many shots of Dr. McGillicuttys. (I probably misspelled that, but I sure as hell am not looking it up. I ain't gettin' paid for this.)

So yeah, the point is, I was not drunk. Alcohol was in no way involved in this event. But my general poor driving skills, and the state of the Wisconsin roads on an April morning were involved. I turned insufficiently hard left, and ended up sending us skidding off the road into a snowbank.

In times of danger, one's life is said to flash before one's eyes. I don't recall a life, just an oncoming snowbank. And I remember thinking "well, fuck." Bess says that she was trying to figure out what the deploying airbag was going to do to her lip piercing. Fortunately, the airbags didn't deploy, and when the car came to a stop in the snowbank, we weren't dead. We were, however, in a snowbank.

Having assessed the situation, the first thing I did was turn off the music. And that's the connection to the Flogging Molly song. The entire crash happened with Between a Man and a Woman playing in the background. And of course, like all dramatic moments, the crash happened in slow motion, so we probably heard, like, half the song. So that's it. I hope you weren't hoping for something cooler or more dramatic. If all you cared about was why I don't listen to that song, stop reading now, but then you'll miss the part about the pie. Anyway, all our efforts to get the car back on the road failed, so we did the logical thing and started walking up the driveway to the farm across the street.

I don't remember why we didn't just walk home and try to call a tow truck. Maybe Bess does. Probably it was because there wasn't internet in the house and the phonebook was from 1979. And we couldn't call from where we were, because cell phone reception was so nonexistent in Wisconsin we left our phones in the house. So we were pretty stuck, and the farm seemed like a good place to start; it was certainly closer than our cell phones.

We noticed as we approached the farmhouse that this place had a lot of dogs. Also cows, but the dogs were really making their presence known. There was a wide range of dogs, too, from tiny little comical purse dogs, running around up to their chins in snow to Labradors and some sort of dalmatian mix. The one that was grabbing our attention was a German shepherd. It had that way of barking that German shepherds have of saying "this is not a bark. A bark is a friendly, happy noise, such as might be made by a collie before it catches a frisbee and rescues a small child from a well. This is the noise I make before I rip your throat out and chew off your face. Because I hate you." It's a bark to be respected. Also there were these dips in the driveway that were covered with thin sheets of ice that sometimes you could walk on, sometimes you couldn't, and we kept tripping when they broke and slipping when they didn't. It sucked. Neither of us had shoes for dealing with snow and ice, because our plan had been to park in a parking lot, go into a store, and buy beans or something, not get caught in a snowbank. We kind of skirted the fenced in part of the yard, calling "hello? Is anyone who is not a cow or a scary dog home?"

A guy came outside. He was very nice, and drove us back to the street in his pickup truck to take a look at what could be done about the car. We asked him about calling a tow truck, but he pointed out that it was Easter Sunday, and we were in Ruralland, so that probably wasn't going to work. Fortunately, this guy was a badass. He lay down under the car, despite the snow and him having an artificial hip, and an artificial knee, and concluded that nothing important was broken, though a big, vaguely important-looking piece of plastic did, in fact, come off in his hand. Then he went to get some chains from his truck.

First, though, there was something he wanted to clear up. "I used to be a cop," he said. "So I need to know; are you on drugs?" We assured him that we were not. "And you have a license?" he asked next. I assured him that I did, and that Bess, who wasn't the one driving, would get one as soon as possible. He nodded. "Just have to make sure before I can help you," he said. The questions really were not unkindly meant, he just needed to ask them. He dragged our car out of the snow, and we were on our way.

Thing is, no one could call me and Bess ungrateful. We wanted to do something nice for him to show that we appreciated him pulling us out of the snow. We had offered awkwardly to pay him for his time, and, you know, lying down on the snow with an artificial hip and knee, but he said no, so we figured we'd do something else. We'd get him something! Something nice, and full of gratitude. The next day, or rather, Tuesday, since it turns out Easter Monday is a holiday too, we went into town and started trying to find something.

We were at a loss. The only thing open in town was the grocery store. We considered a bottle of wine, but not everyone drinks wine, and people in Wisconsin who do tend to drink way, way too much of it. We thought about some...what do you get people? Flowers? There were no flowers. Uh...we had no idea. Eventually we went to the bakery section and bought a pie. I think it was apple. It cost 4.50. We were ashamed of our pie, but it was the best we could do. We got a card, too. We drove back to the farm house.

The saga of getting to the door was just as fun the second time around. The scary dog didn't like us any more now that we were bearing a shitty grocery store pie, although the hyper little dog seemed just as enthusiastic. Eventually the guy came to the door, and we said, and I quote "hi, sorry to disturb you again. Thank you for getting us out of the snow! We got you a pie. Happy Easter!" Then we went home and tried to forget all about it. We are really not very good at expressing gratitude in baked good form.

So that's why I've been skipping that song. Because it reminded me of how dumb I was getting stuck in the snowbank, and of how lame the pie was that we bought to thank the guy who got us out. But that's a silly reason, so I'll probably start listening to the song. Except it's not a great song, and it's right before From the Back of a Broken Dream, which is a great song, so who knows? I'm just glad I didn't crash during a song I really liked. That would be sad.

More past-adventures to be written up soon! Tell your friends. Tell the world.

Things I Read That You Should Too: Connie Willis' Blackout and All Clear

2010-11-07T09:30:00.000-05:00

Hey look, it's me, I'm blogging again! And I'm doing a book review, because why on earth not?

So, Connie Willis. I love Connie Willis. I love The Doomsday Book, I love To Say Nothing of the Dog, I love Passage, I intend to love Lincoln's Dreams and Bellwether and all the rest as soon as I get around to reading them, and now that Blackout, and its sequel/second volume All Clear are out, I can safely say that I love them as well. This review will contain no major spoilers for any Willis books, but it will contain a fair amount of ranting (or, in internet parlance, squeeing) over several of her stories, including the ones I'm actually meant to be reviewing here. Blackout and All Clear are set in the same universe as Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog; an Oxford of the near future, where time travel is used to study history.

Something that I've found to be a running theme throughout Willis' work is having a viewpoint protagonist who is chronically sleep-deprived. It's absolutely brilliant, as a way of making us sympathize with the narrator. How can we not feel for Passage's Dr. Joanna Lander as she tries to dodge a conversation with the odious Maurice Mandrake, when all she can think is that she hasn't slept in days and can't remember the last time she ate? It's probably one of the most universal human experiences; no matter who we are, what culture we come from, what our life is like, we are all of us not at our best when we haven't slept. There's a reason they use it for torture. Small things seem devastating, and devastating things become even further beyond our ability to cope with. In the case of Willis' protagonists, this can get extreme, not to mention funny, most brilliantly in To Say Nothing of the Dog. For large portions of the book, the narrator is suffering, not just from sleep deprivation , but from "time lag," which is like sleep deprivation squared, with hilarious and confusing results as his narration gets more prosey and less reliable. We, the reader, can see him missing important facts (was anyone surprised when Verity turned out to be his contact, rather than Tristan? No. No one was.) but we can't be frustrated with him for being so dense, because we know that he's running lost in the Victorian era, and the poor bastard hasn't slept since before 1940.

The real brilliance of the World War II time traveling protagonists' sleep deprivation in Blackout and All Clear is not just that we as the reader sympathize, or that it actually drives the plot (it's Michael Davies' desperate, but ill-timed nap that sends him into the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk early in the first book) but that it forces the protagonists to empathize, and fit in all too well with the "contemps." Polly, who has been sent to observe the London Blitz first hand, is no more sleepy and miserable than any contemporary Londoner, and it puts her on their level and in their mindset. In fact, for all three of the time travelers, Michael Davies, sent to observe heroes in crisis situations, Polly, sent to observe the Blitz, and Merope, sent to observe children evacuated to the country (a brilliant moment showing the specialization that each of the historians have within their own field comes when Michael mentions the evacuation of Dunkirk, and Merope blinks in confusion and asks if children were sent there from London. Even within the WWII period, they've all got their specialties, in a very believable and fundamentally academic way) observation is forgotten; they are all far too involved in what's going on to be considered mere observers.

Polly, crouching in a shelter by night, and staggering into her work in the morning, exhausted, and on one occasion, filthy, bruised, and shell-shocked, is not watching Londoners deal with the Blitz, she's dealing with it herself. Merope, annoyed by the more rambunctious evacuees, and pre-occupied with the various preparations being made to stave off an invasion, is living the life of a maid in an English country manor during the war, just as Michael ends up smack in the middle of the heroic moments he is meant to be observing. And surely that's the point of the way these historians observe history. It certainly makes for a compelling combination of science fiction and historical fiction. While Merope is agonizing over whether she should allow evacuated children to be sent on a ship to Canada that she, as a future historian, knows will be torpedoed in the North Atlantic, and while Michael is growing increasingly convinced that his actions at Dunkirk have started the unraveling of history itself, Polly is struggling to find a pair of stockings, just like every other London shopgirl during the wartime rationing. The reader is fully immersed in 1940s Britain, while at the same time completely caught up in the time travel drama.

The time travel drama, I should note, is very, very good. Of course, with any time travel story, we know there's a good chance that if someone messes with something in the past, the result will be that Hitler ends up winning WWII. I'd say, as a reader of time travel stories, there's about a 50 percent chance, regardless of the action, that the result will be a Nazi victory in WWII. It's just one of those things. It was a concern in To Say Nothing of the Dog, and the time travel there was mostly to the Victorian era. So it should come as no surprise that that's a big worry in Blackout and All Clear. It's not the major concern though, at least, not for long. The time travelers soon realize that the "net" that should be bringing them home isn't working, and the problem quickly becomes far bigger than Hitler. All of this is very well done, partially because the stakes remain very understandable and immediate. The implosion of the space time continuum is all well and good, the fate of the free world is a pressing concern, but the fact that Polly, Merope, and Michael may be stranded in WWII is a lot easier to comprehend and connect with emotionally.

Then there's the brilliant way that time travel is used to drive the plot, and to keep the reader guessing. I won't spoil anything, but I will repeat a line that the characters use on occasion.
"This is time travel!" (I sort of hear it being said in a "This! Is! SPARTA!" voice, not gonna lie.). What that means is that a person can be any age at any time, and a person can show up in the Blitz twice, at thirty year intervals, from their point of view, and still be there on the same day from the Blitz's point of view. Keep it in mind.

As for the historical fiction aspect of the book...well...a friend and I had identical experiences while reading All Clear. Both of us reported sitting in a public place (me on a bus, her on a plane) reading the end of All Clear, weeping openly, and feeling very, very glad that no one asked us what was going on, because we would have both looked up at them through tears of joy, clutching the book, and said, in enraptured tones "they won! The war is over and the lights are coming on in Trafalgar Square!" And then that person would have thought we were crazy. But that would have been because they haven't read Willis, and don't know about her amazing ability to draw a reader in to an era to such an extent that we actually feel the emotional impact of the VE Day celebrations. It's really shockingly good writing. (Notice how I stuck in that reference to my friend having the same reaction, so you who are reading this wouldn't judge me for being too emotional about the book. You probably think I made her up, don't you? I didn't. Her name is Elsa. She's real.)

Willis' side characters are brilliant as always. Everyone remember T.J. from To Say Nothing of the Dog? Of course you do; he's a wonderful side character you can't help but love, from the moment where he's introduced, slightly smug that he can't be sent to measure roofing tiles in the Middle Ages because he's black, to his realization that since everyone ELSE is measuring roofing tiles in the Middle Ages or chasing pieces of religious artwork through the Blitz and the Victorian era, he is literally the only one left to run the time travel program as everything comes crashing down around him, despite being a completely inexperienced undergrad whose specialty isn't even time travel, but computer science. Like a sleep deprived character, you have to feel for a character so blatantly in over his head, and the half-assed "inspirational" speech T.J. is forced to listen to about Ensign Klepperman ("killed in the line of duty!") is enough to ensure that he'll be our favorite for ever. Willis does this with countless characters in Blackout and All Clear. The vicar in the village where Merope is observing evacuees copes quietly and brilliantly with things that are in no way his job, and Merope's affection for him is instantly easy to relate to. It doesn't matter that we haven't seen much of him; after one page we've seen him talk an hysterical child into calmly boarding a train full of soldiers by himself just when Merope was ready to throw the kid aboard and run away, and we can't not love him, or the Shakespearean actor Polly shares a shelter with in London, who keeps everyone's spirits up by reciting monologues, enduring the painful ignorance of this shelter mates ("I liked the bit from Macbeth about once more into the breach...") in the interest of maintaining everyone's morale.

But the books are equally full of characters we cringe at the sight of, and that's important too. Lady Shrapnell from To Say Nothing of the Dog, anyone? Maurice Mandrake from Passage? Characters like that ensure that the reader is never reading passively. We're running along with the protagonist; feeling their gratitude for any person who makes their lives easier as much as we do their frustration with the ones who make it harder.

Ultimately, I think that's what makes Willis such an astoundingly good writer. She makes us empathize with characters who are doing absolutely insane things, and makes us see the insane, sci-fi things the characters do in the same light we see the more ordinary things. Joanna in Passage drugs herself into near death experiences to try to understand the dying brain, and I as the reader believe it as much as I believe her quest for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and as much as I believe her emotions as she deals with her attachment to a possibly dying child. Ned in To Say Nothing of the Dog is desperately attempting to understand how a cat slipping through the net may have lost the Allies WWII, and what he can do about it, but he's just as at a loss to figure out a Victorian can opener and straight razor. The attention to detail, and the ability to handle the extraordinary as deftly as she handles the every day is, I think, a big part of what makes Willis so marvelous.

So read Blackout and All Clear. Try and get your hands on both, so you can read All Clear immediately upon finishing Blackout, so you won't be in the position I was when I read them as they came out, waiting months for the next one. Enjoy them, and if you haven't read any Willis, I recommend starting with To Say Nothing of the Dog, even though the Doomsday Book comes first chronologically. After all, this is time travel.

Amazon links for Blackout and All Clear

If You're Interested

2010-01-16T01:43:00.000-05:00

I systematically mocked Christian Fundamentalist Jack T. Chick over at http://www.monsterwax.com/chickreviews8B.html#blackcast . I reviewed his new series of tracts, which are "targeted towards black audiences." It's basically Chick's standard Christian fundamentalism, with extra racism. My review attempts, without insulting anyone's beliefs, to point out that this is not necessarily a good thing.

And, uh, happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Avatar: Not Sigourney Weaver's Best Movie About Aliens (Spoiler Alert! Avatar Sucks)

2009-12-30T19:28:00.001-05:00

Avatar sucks, and here's why. This is going to have spoilers in it, if that's the sort of thing you care about, but if you've seen Dances with Wolves and Fern Gully, you know how the movie ends anyway.

So first the part that doesn't suck. Yes, Avatar is a pretty movie. It looks good. I mean, not great; to listen to the hype you'd think people were going to be coming out of the theater weeping tears of pure joy, going blind, or maybe even bursting into flames from the sheer force of this movie's beauty. It ain't that good, people. But it is nice. The animation is realistic and fantastic at the same time, and there are a lot of interesting alien creatures. Only about half of them are basically blown up versions of stuff you would see snorkeling. And I saw it in 3-D which had the advantage of really sucking me into the film, and the disadvantage of giving me a wicked headache.

And then, unfortunately, there's the rest of it. I'm not going to touch the ridiculousness of the names, with a protagonist named "Sully" coming into a Utopian paradise. That's an easy target. Instead, I will tell you this sweeping generalization: the writing is awful.

I want to say that again, in case I wasn't using my emphatic typing voice:

The. Writing. Is. Awful.

From the incredibly douchey voice overs our hero has, where he narrates the movie in the tritest, most annoying possible way to the cliched and offensive plotline, there is just nothing good about the writing in Avatar. Let's look at the first five (or so. I didn't have a stop watch, and I'm doing this from memory) minutes of the film.

So first there's this much-praised sequence that's in zero G. Visually speaking, yeah, it's alright. They're in zero gravity, and it looks pretty good; I don't really know what else to say about that. Then, we find out that Annoying-Voice-Over-Protagonist's brother is dead. Sorry, specifically, as the protagonist annoyingly voice overs in an annoying way, "his life was ended by a man with a gun for the paper in his wallet." Then, just in case we didn't get the message that this is an evil, sterile, soulless society, we see the brother get laid to rest. In a coffin made of corrugated cardboard. With a serial number on the outside. Did I mention that inside the coffin he's wrapped in what appears to be a Hefty bag? This soulless and evil coffin is then placed in a crematoria, where the Protagonist watches through a little viewing window as his brother's corpse burns. Because that's how cremations work, in the evil, soulless, corporate future. Nothing says healthy grieving like watching your cardboard-encased loved one roast. Oh, and in case we didn't get it, we'll later see the N'avi (or maybe Na'vi. Whatever; the aliens/Native American standins. You totally can't hear the apostrophe anyway) bury a dead member of their society by lovingly nestling her into a womb-like grave at the root of a tree, strewn with flowers. No Hefty bags here! Because these guys are good, and soulful, and in touch with nature. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Then we get to the planet. Sorry, moon. It's called Pandora. Because classical references make stuff smart, and you never actually have to think about them! (See also, Stargate's "Icarus" space station. Who the hell names a space project after something that crashed and died?). We hear this army guy drone on and on about how it's the worst place ever. He actually recommends that his soldiers head to Hell for a little R&R after hanging out on Pandora. He is apparently saying this for no reason at all, as it'll be about two hours and hundreds of shots of pretty flowers into the movie before we see any of the human characters even vaguely menaced, and even then it's only after they blast the everloving crap out of the peaceful natives. maybe military guy assumes they're all really allergic to pollen, or terrified of eerily glowing mushrooms. But whatever. The movie only gets worse from there.

Of course, protagonist is the guy who uses a specially grown alien body to go out and learn about the local Native Americans. I mean aliens. This next part is painfully predictable. He's supposed to be figuring out how to destroy them, but he falls in love with their way of life, their warrior code, their respect for nature, and also a random female one of them, and realizes that they are a good bunch of people who are in touch with the planet (sorry, moon) and switches sides, leading them to victory. And sending the humans home to their "dying planet," a line that comes right at the end and seems really unfair to me. Sully gets to stay with the Na'vi, but he condemns the rest of the humans to death? So previous generations screwed up the Earth, but seriously? You can't reach some kind of truce that doesn't lead to the death of a species? Whatever, judgmental Kevin Costner stand-in.

There are no downsides to his life among the Na'vi, which makes the whole thing pretty boring. They're an idyllic, utopian society, which means there's no reason he wouldn't choose to stay with them, and makes his decision to help them seem really selfish. He wants to preserve their society so that he personally can live in it. Because why save a culture that isn't your own, right? Oh, and before I forget, the one other thing I did like (who said this review was all negative?) was the way the protagonist, who has lost the use of his legs in combat, is initially thrilled to run around in an alien body, just for the sheer joy of running and wiggling his toes in the dirt, which is quite touching, really. But then there's the bad stuff.

Yes, it's a great big crappy Native American allegory. They don't even try to make it subtle. It's like, here's a bunch of noble savages! Look, aren't they noble? They've got a warrior culture, and a tribal system, and a close connection with nature, and a really stereotypically Native American aesthetic. They are pretty much the perfect embodiment of modern white culture's stereotypes about Native Americans, but ten feet tall and blue. There are moments where the metaphor feels really forced, too, like when Evil Corporate Guy is talking about how it's the humans' right to take what they want here, and he actually calls the N'avi "savages." Now, maybe this is just me, but if I were trying to dehumanize a group of people so as to justify taking their land, and I had the huge advantage that they were in fact not human, I'd bring that up. I'd call them "aliens," for example. Who feels bad about fighting space aliens from space? Using a term so clearly associated with Earth's colonization felt really forced, and just made the whole big unsubtle thing even more annoyingly unsubtle.

And then...ok, we've seen this plotline before, and it's bull. White man is charmed and seduced by a native culture, and becomes one of them. Their society is so much better than the one he comes from, which is soulless and evil and corporate and filled with cardboard coffins and stuff, while theirs is beautiful and mysterious and in touch with nature. First of all, I was raised by two anthropologists (a fact that some people believe tells you pretty much all you need to know about me) so I take immediate issue with two aspects of that. Firstly the idea that one culture is objectively "better" than another, is ridiculously overly simplistic, and annoying. What does that even mean? Secondly, the way the native culture is portrayed is always way, way more a product of the modern, white, western view of an idealized Noble Savage than any actual Native American culture. And that's insulting to Native Americans by itself. Then there's the fact that having joined their society, our hero LEADS his new people.

You know what? I would be ok with him deciding to throw in his lot with the new society, providing it was portrayed in a realistic and nuanced way. I would be ok with a protagonist deciding that they were in the right and that it was his obligation to prevent their culture from being obliterated by invaders, especially (and this would be interesting) he knew he could never live within their society, but wanted to see it preserved anyway, because he was, you know, a good person who doesn't care for genocide. But in what stupid, screwed up universe does that mean he becomes their freaking leader?

Hey, remember that war where one army was lead by a traitor from the other side?

No, no you don't, because that never happened. Because it's stupid. I would be infinitely ok with him handing over a bunch of insider information ("their defenses are here and here, they'd be vulnerable here, they have a hidden weapon here, this one leader guy is afraid of flowers for some reason" etc) and then taking his place in the ranks. And his place is as cannon fodder, not as a general, because he's a newcomer, and an outsider, and he's already switched sides once, so who's going to trust him? I can't tell you how mad the scene where Sully rouses the Na'vi with a speech that includes the words "let's tell them that this land is OURS!" made me. To misquote another stereotyped Native American, "what do you mean 'ours' Kemosabe?" He came the length of a summer vacation ago, and suddenly the land is his? That sounds a mite imperialistic doesn't it? Do you like how he gets to stay and keep the land as his own, because of the fluke of having ended up inside a N'avi body? So really, he wins out in every way. Instead of having to deal with the Hell that his society has apparently created for itself, he gets to run away and join these idealized natives, and kick the rest of the nasty humans off the planet. They have to deal with the consequences of past generations, but he doesn't, because he has a conscience and a blue body. It's a nice, neat way of getting him off the hook for his culture's attempt at imperialism, and he gets to have everything he wants! Good for him, I guess.

The movie's racial politics have been picked apart elsewhere. Like I said, it's Dances With Wolves all over again, except worse, because it misses the opportunity provided by a sci-fi setting to do something truly interesting. I was intrigued by the whole idea of the N'avi plugging themselves into a network of electrical impulses that allows them to communicate with each other, and all the life on the planet, but it would have been a lot more interesting if it hadn't been handled in such a New Agey, stereotype of an Animistic religion sort of way. If it had been presented as a cool sci-fi premise, and a unique society been allowed to develop from it, I might have stayed interested. So with that, let's move on from the movie's crappy, crappy racial politics, because I want to talk about women.

Women end up as props in stories like this. Sully falls in love with what's-her-name, the Na'vi woman, not because of any particular qualities on her part, but because she's the embodiment of the culture he's finding himself drawn to. She has no recognizable personality traits that could not also be identified as aspects of her culture. She's basically a party favor, one more thing to tempt the male character over to the other side. Sigourney Weaver's presence of course made me think of Alien, which raised the thought that if the Na'vi had been designed by H.R. Giger, this would have been a very different, and much more awesome film. Sure, anyone can fall in love with a semi-nude, vaguely feline chick the proportions of a runway model, but wouldn't it have been more interesting for him to fall in love with something that looks like it burst from the mind of Giger? That's when you know their love isn't based on anything physical. But no, what's-her-name is merely an aesthetically pleasing embodiment of a New Agey society, and pretty damn easy for Sully to fall in love with.The only other important female character is the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver, and her presence is seriously depressing (warning: this is the part of the review where I talk about how good Alien and its sequels was).

In Alien, Sigourney Weaver played one of the first and only female sci-fi characters who is a strong action hero in her own right, rather than being defined by her relationship to the male characters in the story. Pick apart the forced pregnancy subtext all you want, but the fact is that had her character in the first movie been a man, absolutely no aspect of the story would have changed, and I think that's wonderful. Ripley is resourceful, intelligent, brave, and kicks a tremendous amount of ass. The films are about a woman, but they are not about her AS a woman, they are about her as a hero. In this film, Sigourney Weaver is...sensitive and compassionate. Also maternal. How very interesting and groundbreaking for a female character. There's only one other female character who isn't a witch doctor. It's the freaking future, can't there be a few more female soldiers? Are we really going to get no closer to gender equality by the time we make it to space and are capable of uploading our brains into bio-engineered aliens? That's depressing as all hell. Combine that with a woman who serves as nothing but a reward for the male protagonist, and you have a movie whose gender politics are as far behind as its racial politics. And a MirMir who walks out of that movie unhappy, no matter how many bioluminscent air jellyfish there are.

So don't see Avatar. See Sherlock Holmes. It is a good movie.

In Which I Promise to be Careful

2009-12-21T07:41:00.000-05:00

I have been in New York for, let's see, 16 days now. My stay in Delaware, once I got off the Nyckel, was mostly dull, my biggest accomplishment being the creation of soup out of a thing that looked like this:
It has a name, but I don't care. I call it an Alien Fractal Plant.

That finished, I went up to visit Bess in Toronto, a trip I unfortunately have no photodocumentation of, but it was a lot of fun. We took Toronto by storm. Possibly even the entire nation of Canada. One of my old shipmates from the Roseway was in town, so we caught up over drinks. Eventually though, it was time for me to leave, and begin the next bit of my still-mostly-planless life in New York City.

So far, I've been doing my job (taking care of a 9 year old and a 13 year old, cooking, a bit of cleaning, etc) and spending the majority of the rest of my time being delighted to be in Manhattan. I really won out on this deal; I could NEVER afford to live in the West Village on my own dime, so living with the people I'm working for is pretty much the best thing ever. The kids (and parents) are great, and I've been enjoying cooking for a much-smaller-than-I'm-used-to group. I've gotten to do the cooking for a couple special occasions, too, which has been full of wacky adventures in city life, kosher cooking, and holiday drama, none of which are really interesting enough to merit a blog entry.

As you all are probably aware, from the hysterical reportings of every news agency out there, it snowed in New York City a couple days ago. Mostly it's been like the city's been doing an impression of Chicago, except for the people, who have been doing a bit more freaking out about the weather than would be typical back there. I've been inordinately excited about the whole thing, though, considering I missed out on winter entirely last year, and haven't seen snow in a good long while. With that in mind, I was pretty pleased to see New York transform into the ice planet Hoth. I went out during the snow and took some pictures, then the next day, which I had off, I walked up to Central Park and took a few more. (Do you know how long it takes to walk from the West Village to Central Park? A while. That's how long.). And then I posted them on my blog.

These guys had come out for the same reason I did, so we did a bit of taking pictures of each other taking pictures. Arty.

The next day.

Three stranded vehicles:

The park:

So, that's what I've been up to. That and really enjoying the West Village. To cite one tiny example, I'm right up the street from the White Horse bar, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death (morbid poetic/alcoholic history! Is there a better kind?) and about a ten minute walk from the Stonewall. Truly this place is a paradise of historically significant bars. I also want to add that, for some reason, everyone I speak to here, upon finding out that I'm new to the city, makes a big thing of telling me to "be careful." I'm not sure if that's a generic warning for newcomers, or if I just come off as really dumb and naive, likely to get myself into trouble, etc. In which case, fair enough. But either way, yes, I shall be careful.

Now What?

2009-11-17T01:16:00.000-05:00

I had a fantastic sail on the Kalmar Nyckel, as always. She is a truly gorgeous ship, her crew is phenomenal, and every time I sail on her I am reminded of how damn much I love square rig. I got to spend about eighty percent of my time aloft, since on the sail back (I hadn't planned to stick around for that long, but these things are addictive) we were doing downrigging. Plus I go aloft on the flimsiest excuses imaginable. Ask anyone. I love working aloft, actually. I think I experience vertigo as a kind of love, rather than fear, of heights. I get a rush from it that just makes me feel alive and exhilarated. The mainmast flagstaff of the Nyckel, a hundred plus feet above the deck, is probably one of my favorite places in the world to be. (Not to knock the mizzen or the sprit tops. Those are great, if only because of the novelty value of going up to the mizzen top). We threw a fantastic Halloween party for all the tall ship sailors in town, took in a movie theater screening of that tall ship classic Irving Johnson's Around Cape Horn, which we yelled lines at, all RHPS style, wrote lewd alternate lyrics to sea chanties, and generally had a great time. I would probably be sailing with that ship right now, if she wasn't downrigged and at the shipyard in Wilmington.

Here's my Halloween costume. The bosun let me borrow an old Dutch flag that used to fly on the mizzen, and I turned it into a toga, added wings and became...the Flying Dutchman. True, this would work better if I were, you know, a man, but it's still good, right?

And no way does it beat Carrie's past costume, where she wrapped her friend up in blue ribbons and had her go as Tangled Up In Blue.

And no way does it beat Gen and Woody's costume: Rum Runners, in a jury-rigged canoe, complete with unmarked bottles of rum and 1920s style suits. Any costume that comes with a homemade boat is an automatic win. Especially when you sail it up the Chester river and moor it to the side of the Nyckel.

After all that I got the chance to meet up with the Amistad crew again in Baltimore, which was lovely. Great boat, great crew, and I wish them all fair winds on their way to the Caribbean!

And now? Now I'm going to Manhattan. Greenwich Village, in fact, where my uncle and aunt have asked me to come live with them and act as nanny for their two young kids. Their kids, my cousins, are, as it happens, awesome, way smarter than I was at that age, and in the case of the older one, an actual rock star. Seriously, he's in a band and plays damn good electric guitar for an eighth grader. I'll be doing some cooking too, (dinner every night for the whole family, packed lunch for the kids) which is nice, since I'm now officially Into Cooking. I also hope to take a television writing course in the city, so if you know of any good programs, do please let me know.

And after that? I'll probably run away to sea again. But who knows. I'll be in NYC until sometime in June. Anyone around there? We should hang out.

And what the hell, here's a picture of the Kalmar Nyckel, so you don't forget how beautiful she is:

So, How Did the March Go?

2009-10-28T19:28:00.000-04:00

Actually, it went quite well, thank you for asking, and despite all my paranoid fears about Things Going Wrong. Me and Ilona (fellow organizer, who did waaaaay more work than me) got to the rally point at approximately oh-dark-hundred-hours, when it was still icy cold and the streets were empty. We stood around, stamping our feet to keep warm, and I stared at the Metro station across from us, worrying. About a half hour before I told people to show up, and about fifteen minutes before the other March organizers arrived with t-shirts, megaphones, and walkie talkies, the first volunteers started to arrive. I pulled out the list of people I had personally called to harass about showing up the day before, and began checking them off as they gave me their names. In all, we ended up with well over forty, of a best-case-scenario-hoped-for fifty. That was in that location, in the other, it's my understanding they did just as well. So hooray for meeting goals!

The march itself was a pretty phenomenal success. We had over two hundred thousand people, and made lead story on the Daily Show. I had a much longer post written about this, but the internet ate it and I don't have the heart to try and type it all out again.

I just finished up a week's sailing on the Kalmar Nyckel. We went to Chestertown Maryland for the Sultana's downrigging weekend, then downrigged ourselves on the way back. Downrigging is awesome and fun, with plenty of work aloft, and taking the ship apart is a great way to see how everything works.

2009 Toronto Zombie Walk - Makeup fun

2009-10-25T12:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Oct 24th, was Toronto's 7th annual Zombie Walk.

As I have totally failed to mention, I - Bess - have moved back to Canada. I did this about two months ago and thus far have been mainly unpacking and job hunting. The job market here is about as aweome as it is in the Excited States. That is to say, awful. My misadventures have consisted of handing out resumes, and hanging out with my parents, precious little of which is worth documentation other than to note that all my stuff is in one place for the first time in something like six years.

So what's a girl to do in a strage new town when she doesn't know anyone? If you answered "contact the organizers of the Toronto Zombie walk and volunteer to help out" you should probably get over here and join in the collective brain that is Mirmir and I.

Last week I went flyering with Thea Munster (look, that's the name she goes by and I ain't gonna argue), who started the whole thing 7 years ago, and then this week was the walk. I might link to some of the press that the walk garnered since there were well over 3500 zombies walking the streets (we estimate closer to 6000) and the whole thing was generally awesome, but the point of this post is actually to demonstrate my makeup and how I did it, for anyone who might be interested.

I should preface this by saying that prior to yesterday I had actually never used liquid latex before and had half-assedly read some internet How Tos before deciding that caution was for people with skin allergies and no experien- wait. Crap.

Step One.
I slathered the left side of my face with white greasepaint and then used green, blue, grey, fuscia and yellow blush and eyeshadow to create a bruise effect around my left eye and to add shadow to my cheekbone and temple. I also put the white greasepaint on the back of my neck and in my left ear, and down my chest because I'm anal retentive and there's nothing I like less than zombies who don't blend.

Step Two.
I covered my right eyebrow with medical tape so as to avoid ripping it off later on. Then I put toilet paper over my eye and stuck it down with the liquid latex. They say to apply the latex with a letex sponge. I had non-latex sponges that didn't absorb the stuff at all and pretty much just slathered it on. I then layered on some more TP and latex and continued the effect down my face, neck and over my chest. This made a big mess. Put newspaper down on the surface you're working on if you don't want it getting wrecked.

(Please pardon my almost nudity)

Note how my hair looks like it might be sticking to the liquid latex. Make sure you pin your hair back throughly if you do this because I did get it in my hair. And getting it back out again is really freaking painful.

Under the TP my eye is actually open. I could blink under the makeup, and while I couldn't see out of that eye, being able to move it normally made the whole thing much less annoying than you would think. I was able to do this because of a pocket created by the TP, and because I didn't stick my eye shut with medical tape. I put the latex on top of the TP because I had a few layers of the stuff, but I didn't put a layer of latex on my eyelid, so there was nothing for that first layer to stick to but the edges of the socket.

I should also say that I had my eye screwed tightly shut when I put the latex near it. Just the wet stuff near my eye made my eye feel watery and burny so DO NOT GET IT IN YOUR EYE. For goodness sake, please do not injure yourself. If you do get it in your eye, rinse with water immediately and go to the ER. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye and then it's fun you can't see.

Step Three.

Once the latex was dry I used another sponge to rub red greasepaint over the ridged surface, creating this effect.

Then I did the same with black greasepaint.

And then I added more red.

Lather, rinse repeat, until all the white/pink of the TP and latex was covered up. I also used a paintbrush to help get into the crevices, and stippled out past the latex onto my skin, into my right ear and over my chest a little more.

Greasepaint, especially in this quantity will smear and get on just about everything. I was intending to get bloody before the end of the day, so I wasn't worried about my shirt, but just a FYI, you will get smudging on your clothing.

Step Four.

I made a blood mixture of chocolate syrup, red food dye, and corn starch and put it over the makeup. This is edible but the dye can stain a little, so make sure you're okay with that before dousing yourself in it. I had a pretty heavy chocolate to dye ratio making the blood darker, but switching that would make the blood brighter.

Then, because it is edible, I put it in my mouth and spat it back out over my chin and daubed it around my mouth.

I wore that on my face for over 12 hours and it wasn't too bad. It didn't really hurt, and except for having no peripheral vision or depth perception, it wasn't a problem getting around.

And that's my zombie tutorial for the day.

Oh, wait. In case you were curious: Getting it off again.

I peeled the latex off in two big chunks, which hurt around my jawline. It also hurt where it had got stuck in my hair. I then picked off the little bits still on my face and chest and in my hair as best I could before hopping in the shower and scrubbing like a woman possessed with a rough glove and a whole lot of soap.

I then got out of the shower, used eyemakeup remover on my whole face and chest (and the back of my neck and in my ears) and then got back in the shower and scrubbed a little more.

I washed my hair and cleaned out my ears and got 99% of the stuff off me. Then I moistureized like no one's business.

I have a very mild red irritation on my chest but I have realized this is from where I used commercial fake blood to touch up my effect later in the day. This is whyyou should use products you know and trust, and also why making your own fake blood is good. You get the colour you want, you know what's in it, it's tasty and hopefully it won't irritate your skin.

Happy haunting!