Well, Why Not?

My publisher and good friend, Daniel Rappaport talks Toy to the World and Pazzaria at Blue Fuss, asking elliptically (on the nose) some questions I hope the will be covered when Toy to the World and Pazzaria launches in the coming days.

Is it really damaging to children if two of their favorite characters of the same gender have a romance?

To have a governing body be manipulative and wrong... no matter how old, tall, or bearded those governors (Gandalf cough Dumbledore cough hack wheeze) happen to be.

To get political?

And, on the flipside, how bad is the classist, stereotype-reinforcing, middle class, faux-sentimentalism of major swathes of Young Adult and youth-friendly entertainment? How tiresome are I'm the boss of you/No, I'm the boss of me! arguments? Wealthy power-imbued beloved uber-jocks who have the cuties hanging around them endlessly, portrayed with a pretense of being picked on and downtrodden because they slept on an uncomfortable bed once and their parents were murdered? Petty revenge as an honorable - and just - and hilarious - element? Or, poor picked on pop stars, to have to lie to the world and their friends... because it makes their (fabulous super-wealthy popstar) life easier? Magical creatures used as metaphors for nonwhite ethnicities, non-het sexualities, or political factions?

They do this, not just for children, swapping in a monster for an oppressed or (perceived) nonstandard group. As though there is a sensible throughline of any functionality or moral lesson, in substituting vampires or werewolves for, say, nonwhites moving into the neighborhood. And the fear is almost always validated, usually with a knowing wink and some parental cognizance (see Wizards of Waverly Place's emphasis on not dating outside your kind, which means, apparently, being a jerk because your date has a back-end you don't like (in this case, a horse-end). When this is sold to adults as meaningful and intellectual, one can't help but feel the audience is supposed to have their critical faculties blinded by the sheer novelty of metaphor. The heck with that!

I can't tell you exactly what Pazzaria will be doing or how, but I can promise you I'm doing my best to make sure no one is having their intelligence insulted and that everyone is entertained.

Uncovered: a Pageant of Hip Hop Masters

In the Riverside area in a couple weeks?

Score some tickets for Rickerby Hinds' Uncovered at the University of California at Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery.



Music, dance, and visual art for ten dollars a seat? You know you want to.

Subjective Journalizmo

Parallel to this world is a world at right angles to that one, stacked on another like bread of a wish sandwich, wherein Walter Cronkite and Hunter Thompson never retired from the field in such idiosyncratic manners, no one has ever heard the phrase "It's only Fox News", and David Frost was never filtered into a retrospective popstar messiah with excellent lapels for an audience who can't seem to hold in their heads, simultaneously, that Frost is still a working, functional journalist.


The face of professional news is barely-restrained machismo and swish tactics spread across seventy television channels and increasingly parochial regurgitation of AP announcements, only on Tuesdays, and the alternative is not marxist struggle pamphlets for the perpetuation of the marxist struggle (success is death!) or crypto-capitalism in the form of fetish sites (success is death!) unto an infinity of authenticity brands.

Thomas Wolfe outlived Tom Wolfe, in this world, both men leaving behind glorious patrician-tastic bodies of literature.

This world also has aerodynamically sound and properly winged eight-legged horses, because... why the hell not.

Horatio Alger was unavailable for comment.

Ambrose Bierce was still in Mexico.

John Ostrander Comix 4 Sight

John Ostrander is losing his eyesight to glaucoma. Surgeries can stave that off, but surgeries cost money.

If you've enjoyed Ostrander's work on Wasteland, Manhunter, or anything else over his long and varied career, please visit this site and consider donating. If you have no idea who John Ostrander is, but experience any empathy at the thought of a writer whose eyes are threatened, visit the site.

Inaccuracies as They are Taught

The problem with the following is not simply that they are taught to impressionable students from often an early age, but that those students are frequently unwilling to shed their early indoctrination even the face of absolutely negating evidence. They teach the same lessons to their children or send them to schools to have others (who were taught the same lies and misinformation) do the teaching, until, generation by generation, these lies become self-evident truths, no matter how Galileo protests it still moves (or doesn’t, depending on the set of lies you were taught as a kid).

*******

The Bohr Model of the atom is pretty, it often reminds one of a planet and moons orbiting it, but it is inaccurate and we have known so since at least the Nineteen Thirties. Electrons do not orbit, as their pattern has no continuity of movement, only of placement (they appear to maintain a measured periphery).

Leonardo da Vinci, that great polymath for whom the term “renaissance man” was practically invented, is a painter, anatomist, botanist, musician, writer and engineer. True enough. What is avoided in these introductions to the man and his work is that he – quite understandably – was much better in some fields than others, and engineering (if one is shooting for practical, workable machinery) was not his highlight. da Vinci’s machines look great, they are marvelous designs, but do any of them work? Not in his own time or with the materials of his time, and rarely outside of miniatures, models, or reductions.

Grammar is immutable. There is a special Heaven where Mark Twain is refusing to duel with Strunk and White, possibly intent on shooting them in the back later (for safe measure). Okeh, there isn’t, but grammar is a mutable, bendable, growing and defecating beast that should be stabbed, prodded, and threatened into doing what we want of it, not what it insists is its nature that cannot be altered.

If (the right) scientists or governments don’t follow up on something, it’s because it’s obviously wrong and not worth our time. We hear that often enough, from global warming to cocaine in the veins of mummies or the very blatant and obvious trade, conflict, and relations between Japan, Russia, and the northwesternmost points of North America since well before Columbus hit the easterly side of the Western Hemisphere. Because science never bows to politics, and neither do scientists. Even those with book deals or government contracts.

Redskin refers to Native Americans’ red skin. This has fueled a delusion amongst many that, while the Eastern Hemisphere has a variety of skintones, the Western has one and everything else is somehow a violation or less-than truly Native American. In fact, the term is a polite euphemism for the scalps and skins of Native peoples which were sold to White people in the Americas and Europe for novelty purposes and to efficaciously reduce the indigenous populations where such White people might want to move and do business.

Gilles de Rais was a monstrous mass murderer and devil woshipper. He was also a patriot, poet, and friend of fellow soldier, Jeanne d’Arc, who faced a similar trial to his own, only to be absolved and sainted post-execution.

The Gettysburg Address freed the slaves in America. Except that it didn’t. The Emancipation Proclamation might get you the mileage you’re looking for, but even that document is essentially a rhetorical threat to the Confederacy and offers no dictates to the North or a cohesive United States as it appears antebellum or today.

The Western Progression of Civilization seems to hinge on a belief that White People are the pinnacle of civilization and it goes where they do. And that White People and civilization is the progress of some desert religions focusing on a set of stories and concepts held by at least three texts of today (the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran) with a throughline of Babylonian to Grecian to Roman to last few hundred years of Western Europe then their colonies. Cultures indigenous to Asia, Africa, and North or South America need not apply for consideration.

Brain Hacking Possibly in Need of Reboot

I'm not even going to ask why CNN is running this, because CNN seems to think HUDs are new and innovative. I will ask, why Wired is treating as a news story, not a particular instance of neuro-hacking, but the concept itself. How many days past the development of NLP or the consumption of alcohol are we? And, as for hacking of the non-self variety... how long has Mickey Finn been in operation?

Names flicker past my eyes like I'm wearing a personal HUD, a hypnagogic crawl: Phil Hine * Colleen Stan * Robert Lifton * Allen Dulles * Richard Helms * Louis Jolyon West * Al Crowley * William Burroughs * George Bush * George Bush * George Wallace * Georgia * Gia Carangi... to the point my brain was full of policemen and Angelina Jolie movies.

"[A]s neural devices become more complicated, and go wireless, some scientists say the risks of 'brain hacking' should be taken seriously," seems to imply that the old-fashioned methods of drug, advertising, and reinforcement aren't to "be taken seriously." To reward myself, I think I'll go buy a Starbucks coffee, praise my nation as being the greatest, and eat the same burger as everyone else and always listen to people in authority and the right uniform. A few billion religious folks breathe a sigh of relief, and a slightly smaller number wonder where all their guilt and grief comes from, then.

We may have heard Scientology breathe a collective sigh of relief, but then again, maybe that's just what the anti-Scientology people want us to believe we heard.

Seeds in Your Mouth

Sherwin Bitsui's book-length poem, Flood Song is available for preorder on Amazon right now! You should secure a copy, so when it comes in a couple months, you'll have forgotten and the arrival will be a nice surprise.

Ignore the editorial review and its insistence that Sherwin "resist[s] being identified solely by race" (who doesn't, of those who are?) and focus on his strong body of previous work and the excerpts that have been released of Flood Son so far (including the brief, beautiful section we ran in FEM). His Whiting Award and Witter Brynner Grant were earned, as were appearances of his work in The Iowa Review, Future Earth Magazine, American Poet and elsewhere.

It's ten dollars and change. If I haven't convinced you, google around, see for yourself. Who's complaining? Anybody? Disappointed customers? Buy the book. Hell, the cover is worth ten bucks:

And the Eyes Have It

I've had the benefit of knowing Melissa Regas since we were at CalArts together, we've published her in two volumes of Future Earth Magazine, and she just keeps wowing me. She's not being agressive or hard-edged, but her work is not fluff, either. The work is there. It is present and commands notice.

I mean, just look at this:

Pazzaria?

You know that young adult project I've mentioned occasionally? Freedom, responsibility, and extropian analyses in a fun fictional package involving child thieves, slavery, an angry, micromanaging would-be god, and explosions for hope? The man who would be toy maker? The great teen terror of the isles? The children of Malivari? The iron rule of King Ferdinand?

What does that have to do with Pazzaria?

Anole of Criticism

This short post interrupted other things I was writing. Specifically, I was trying to draft out notes towards a statement on the dissolution or perpetuation of novelty, the absurdity that techniques are considered experimental in writing decades or centuries after first applied to a language's literatures, and how fear is not a response to the unknown, but actually to the displeasing known.

I discovered, in the midst of that, that Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is, apparently, entirely online and available free. People should know this, just as people should know most of Nabakov's collected oral lectures are available through Google right now.

Once I've slipped my ruminations into a more thorough structure and forced fluidity (or is that forceable?) and that will appear here (or above this, at any rate). Until then, just read the Frye, enjoy what's worthwhile in it, and laugh at what's horribly pretentious or unexpectedly (and apocalyptically) outdated.

Rhythms of Text, Rhythms of Voice

I watch a lot of stuff with subtitles, but there are dub jobs I love, and there are dubs I will watch subtitled, because I love the sounds and rhythms of them, but do not understand enough of the language being utilized to get through without those floaty translations. Language is more than simply grammar or the enunciation of words; rhythms of enunciation are significant and variable intralingually, as well. Attitudinal and professional tones affect the aural experience perhaps more than the actual words do.

Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is delivered in English, but even the actors who obviously can deliver with normative English pronunciation and rhythms (like the lone American performer, Quentin Tarantino) give their lines a flourish that dismantles the meanings of the words, until the dialogue becomes a delivery system not for the meaning of words and phrases, but for sound and rhythm solely. That subtitles are available on some versions of this film is absurd and pretty much misses the point.

Similarly, I don’t think you need to know anything about Tango and Cash to enjoy Stallone and Russell dubbed into Spanish. The pair simply sound cooler and smoother, and a gunboot is excellent in any language.

On the other end of the spectrum, the BBC Choice dub of Urusei Yatsura featuring Matt Lucas and Anna Friel - which is hilarious – significantly loses something, I think, if one were not at least somewhat accustomed to hearing British enunciation and conversation.

Somewhat connected to this, is the effect that subtitles have on the average American movie audience, which is to lend significance to the visual elements of the film while downplay the audio portion. There are parts visual conceits employed by John Woo or Robert Rodriguez, which are treated with a reverence that a film in American English would probably not receive, with exactly the same techniques used (as both of those directors films made in American English would pretty much demonstrate). This is not to say that there are not some brilliant flourishes and unique semiotic elements in these films, but somehow the American audience has been trained to reflexively respond to subtitled films as more thoughtful and meaningful than any other sort. Dubbed films are instantly a lower form.

When subtitles and a dub are employed simultaneously (as opposed to, at alternate points, as with the American release of Trainspotting) the result can be a jangling of the trained responses in the audience. The audience can lose its awareness, find its reflex intake at odds with the presentation.

I once saw a Chinese dub of Returner that slowly shifted the English subtitles to those meant for a cursing-heavy Return of the King. It was a nearly-religious experience, especially when lines would sync up and guns and rings would be confused, “betrayal” and “volcano”.