Fred over at Slacktivist plays a round of everyone’s favorite game, Evil or Stupid? with the latest hollering out of the GOP noise machine:
Today’s contestants are the 52 percent of Republicans who claim to believe that President Obama secretly wants to impose Sharia law.
I find it hard to believe that anyone is stupid enough to really believe such a thing. The Newsweek poll was conducted via telephone, so respondents would have had to recognize the sound of a ringing phone, be able to locate it, pick it up and converse with the pollster on the other end of the line. All of that would be beyond the capability of someone stupid enough to really believe that Obama is secretly trying to impose Sharia law. If you’re smart enough to be able to work a telephone, you’re too smart to believe that nonsense.
The stupidity required here is just too vast, too disabling, for it to be a plausible or a possible explanation.
And that only leaves one choice: More than half of Republicans are evil. They’re lying. And lying out of malice.
His reasoning is sound but there’s always a third way. In this case, Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I’m not saying all of the GOPers who claim to think Obama is a stealth sharia-law enforcing socialist. But there’s a thin wedge in that pie chart where malice and incompetence mix into a tart little slice of incompetence/malice that is indistinguishable from genuine stupidity. I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.
This position seems to be the exclusive domain of a certain slice of 1st world demographics. The sort of people who can afford to be disconnected from reality because they have enough money to insulate themselves from the consequences of their mendacity. That they mange to infect a certain percentage of the low information, high anxiety population who are not so well insulated financially with this meme is a testament to just how insidious some ideas can be. Or Just how stupid many of my fellow Americans can be. Your pick.
When you’ve lost Ron Paul, you know you’re on the wrong side of history:
Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?
It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”
The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.
Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”
The property rights angle is standard Libertarian “property is more important than people” nonsense but it at least points him in the general direction of freedom, iberty and all that stuff. So, Progress! Sort of.
Anything that helps end this long slog through the racist hate mongering underbelly of America is a good thing, so credit where credit is due. Still, two points of quibble:
The Cordoba House is a Mosque in the same way that your local YMCA is a Cathedral. As in, not at all. Unless you think every Mosque comes with a pool and a squash court. In which case, sign me up!
Quibble point 2: the scare quotes around “Ground Zero.” As someone somewhere pointed out, Ground Zero is where you set off a nuke. Comparing the WTC tragedy to, say, Nagasaki is disengenuous to say the least. So there’s something else Paul managed to hit upon, in his klunky and self-interrested way. Looks like assholes are a lot like stopped clocks: right twice a day. If he keeps this up, he may eventually become a decent person. Though he’s still a Republican, so that’s unlikely.
Robert Gibbs can eat a bag of dicks:
During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
Go fuck yourself sideways with a brick, Mr. Gibbs. I’ve defended your boss and his mealy mouthed centrism for nearly 3 years, in the hopes that he’d accomplish a fraction of what he promised. So far he’s done shit. GTMO is still open, we’re still in Afghanistan and Iraq with no end to either occupation in sight and the healthcare bill is a fucking joke. You’ve rolled over for every right wing lunatic’s racist conspiracy theory and now you lash out at your supporters in the feeblest way possible, by building hippie straw men.* Nice. You’re supposed to talk shit about your opponents, not the people who support you.
You don’t want my support, fine, see if I vote for your boss again in 2012.
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* No one wants to shut down the Pentagon. Though turning it into a university once the ludicrously bloated defense budget is cut in half would be nice. I’m all for recycling. I’m also in favor of Canadian style health care, because it covers everyone and costs half as much as our current sloppy wet corporate blowjob of a healthcare system. The only people who dismiss “Canadian Style” Healthcare are fucking Right Wing sociopaths, hoping for some of that trickle down money they keep praying to Supply-Side Jesus for. Man I’m such a hippy!
As Rogers put it, if you want to live in the 21 C, stand over here:
A federal judge in San Francisco decided today that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure that banned same-sex unions.
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This is going to be a popcorn muncher, to be sure. If SCOTUS punt and let the circuit court ruling stand, they get called activist judges by their right wing handlers from now until doomsday. Same if they hear the case and let the ruling stand. If they overturn it, they’ll have a hell of a time writing that decision in English that hasn’t been sent through the GTMO ringer.
Good on ya, California! Now: get rid of Schwarzenegger and start paying your librarians again. Chop chop!
The book club is discussing Neuromancer this month. This is the second book by William Gibson I’ve read, the first being Spook Country. Since they were written a good 20 years apart, I’m taking them as emblematic of his writing style and themes.
I’ll go ahead and admit this first off: I seem to be the only sci-fi geek in the world who doesn’t like Gibson’s work. His books just leave me cold. I’m not entirely sure why. His writing is crisp, if a bit sententious at times and prone to excess lingo but these are the usual tics of vocabulary that you find in most science fiction authors, so it’s not off-putting.[1] I think what I find cold about his writing is the atmosphere.
Gibson — especially in Neuromancer — is mainlining Chandlarian noir. It’s all bad people doing bad things in a fallen world. Which is fine but it’s a little too clinical and detached for me to really get engaged with the characters. Not even the psychopaths seem to have any passion. His characters all have shadowy pasts or just enough pasts to facilitate the plot and nothing more. As if they are conscious of their artificial nature, never having anything more revealed about them than the plot demands. They’re just people doing things for dubious reasons, many of which are never explained or even hinted at.[2] I honestly have no idea why I’m supposed to care about Case or Molly. I feel sorry for Armitage and nothing at all for Riviera. I’m not sure why he’s even there, other than to show off his cool holographic technology.
The characters with the most striking personalities are stereotypes: the Rasta freebooters and the Dixie Flatline, which is the neurological ghost of a dead hacker stored on a hard drive. With a southern accent. They’ll probably be relegated to the comic relief in the movie,[3] which is a shame because they are far more interesting than the main cast.[4]
I suppose I’m supposed to care about the plot but in that reverse osmosis of storytelling, where the bones of Neuromancer have been picked clean by 25 years worth of writers (some of them better at Gibson’s own shtick than he is) I’m finding that a monumental task. I guess it boils down tot the fact that I just don’t give a crap about the whole AI Question.
Science fiction for the last forty years or so has been preoccupied with the tin plated Pinocchios of our imagination and frankly, I’m bored with robots who want to be real boys. I’m even more bored by disembodied consciosusnesses who may or may not be PoMo stand-ins for the God we wished was there but isn’t. I’m fine living in a godless mechanistic universe devoid of rational control or preordained design and I certainly don’t want to build a machine that thinks it’s better than me just because it doesn’t have to poop or ever want to fuck. I’m comfortable in my skin and not interested in escaping it. Which apparently makes me a weirdo in this here twenty first century. I guess my old fashioned humanism isn’t cool any more.[5]
Though on second thought, I think what is missing is a touch of humor. This is a clearly absurd situation, yet every character seems to grok that they’re in a hardboiled sci-fi novel. None of them laugh, except for the Dixie Flatline and even he has trouble with it, because he’s just a simulation of a dead man. Perhaps that’s what’s missing in all this grim grimmy grimness: a bit of gallows humor.
Whatever. Neuromancer needed more heart and soul, or at least a dick joke or two and it’s total lack thereof left me wanting more of something the author clearly is not interested in providing. So clearly it’s not my cup of tea.
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1. There’s probably a whole essay to be written on this topic. Something related to the sci-fi/fantasy vocabulary and the needs of world building that demands a certain level of self conscious lingo. This lingo is a signifier of sorts. It says to the reader that you’re in that world, not this one, and you can tell because we use these weird words. More on that later, after many more cups of coffee.
2. This was especially the case in Spook Country, which I found annoying. Characters run around and do things without much reflection. It reads like a movie script, which would be fine, if it were a movie because then the actors would be telegraphing their motivations through body language and facial expression. But Gibson doesn’t describe people except when he has too and then its filtered through brand name clothing.
3.The movie was mentioned briefly during one of the panels I attended at comic con, by Lou Anders, the editor of Pyre books, who wandered aloud if the movie would be a period piece or contemporary. He was only half joking. But that’s typical Hollywood, where a novel old enough to drink is a cutting edge hot property. I hear next year, they’re adapting that scandalous sex novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.
4. Even Molly. You’ve probably heard of Molly, even if you’ve never read Neuromancer, because she’s become an archetype, the burgeoning post-human with extensive body modifications who is also a cute girl who can kick your ass. She’s Buffy, without the snark or fashion sense and a set of mirror shades over her eyes. After reading the book, I think this reputation is pure fanwank because on the page, she’s a shallow, sad shell of a person and it takes 300 pages just to get that much out of her.
5. Well, there goes my Hugo.
We’re heading down to Comic Con this week. As usual, you can keep up with the hijinks on Twitter. I’ve finally gotten around to setting up twitpic, so there will be photographic evidence that I am in fact, a gigantic nerd.
As you may or may not have heard, Fred Phelps and his cretin brigade are going to be there as well. And while engaging these stratospheric bigots is a no-no (litigious bastards, that they are) Kelly Sue DeConnick has devised an alternate plan:
We need some help in the form of a time-keeper or two, letting us know exactly how long the patron saint of backwards thinking and his family manage to stand and scream in the California sun. Then, by all means, do stare–at your watch! Make a note of what time it is and alert the internet that they’re there/still there. (But do it quietly and from a polite distance, will you?) Go get yourself a cold drink and check back every now and then until we have an approximate time count. Like… here would be good. Or on Twitter, with the hashtag #godlovesbatman
Why? Because in the spirit of love, we are pledging to donate $50 to amfAR if Phelps and his crew actually show up (often they don’t) and $10 an hour additional to amfAR for every hour they stay. And we’ll make our donation in Fred’s name.
We’d love you to join us.
(And we’d really love to be able to post a tally of how much we’ve raised.)
Repost far and wide, my pretties.
So, keep a weather eye peeled for bigots and tweet their times and locations as you do. And if you can spare a few dollars for the cause, that would be lovely as well.
See you in the thick of it!
John Rogers (who is kicking much ass with his show, Leverage, currently in its 3rd season on TNT) brings up a good point while recommending the 2005 version of Bleak House:
I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth revisiting as the TV industry is in flux. This amazing adaptation of Dickins’ Bleak House is split into a one-hour pilot and then 14 more half-hour episodes. Half-hour single camera, highly serialized. This matches the structure and pace of the original text, which was, as our friends at Wikipedia let us know,”published in twenty monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853.” This transforms what could easily be another leisurely historical into a pulp machine.
I love the format and think it’s perfect for adapting novels to live action. It’s patently ridiculous to try and squeeze a full length novel into 2 hours and change for a movie. A short story, yes. Novella, perhaps. But a novel id way too complex a beast to cage up in so tight a space. That’s where the monsters that make up Adaptation Decay come from.
Over at AMC’s filmcritic blog, John Scalzi makes a very good and needed distinction:
I’ve been pretty consistent in my opinion that Hollywood goes a little too often to the well of sequels and remakes, but, philosophically, I don’t really have any problem with filmmakers dipping out of the same well of inspiration or playing with the same basic ideas and running variations of those themes, especially when the filmmakers themselves have wildly divergent perspectives. As an example of this, I give you Michael Herr’s Vietnam War memoir, Dispatches, which served as a partial inspiration for at least two films. In the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, it was transmuted into Apocalypse Now. In the hands of Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket. That’s not a bad spread there.
Inception doesn’t have similarities just to Dreamscape, of course. You could spend a merry day name checking influences from a number of cinematic predecessors, including the aforementioned Matrix and Dark City and, of course, director Christopher Nolan’s own Batman movies. But for me, as a viewer, the question isn’t whether a filmmaker uses the same basic ideas as one film or borrows other ideas from another film and outright steals them from a third. The question for me is what the filmmakers do once they start putting those ideas together as a film. Do it poorly as a filmmaker, and you’ll be told you’ve created a cheap knockoff. Do it well, and you’ll be told you’ve breathtakingly reinvented the concept.
Just replace movie titles with book titles and the same could be said for all of literature, going back to the Epic of Gilgimesh. We all know that there’s nothing new under the sun* but the point isn’t to just photocopy the works that came before, but to reinvent them and do so with the full awareness that the act of telling a story puts you squarely in that weird space where you are confluent with history, art and human imagination. How you choose to fit yourself into that continuity is up to you and the choices you make as a story teller.
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* Like all the best cliches, this one comes form the Bible. If it was true 3000 years ago, you can understand better why today we live in a world with 11 Doctors, 6 James Bonds and 5 Batmen.
An interesting article at Salon about the debate over whether or not to adapt Catcher in the Rye into a movie touches on something I’ve been thinking on for a while, namely, movie adaptations of books. For the record, I’m, indifferent to the debate about Catcher in the Rye. I’m one of maybe two people on the planet who thinks that book is highly overrated.[1]
Whether or not Salinger ever wanted it adapted, he’s dead and its pretty much just a debate of not if but when. And since Hollywood doesn’t make original movies anymore,[2] When will very likely be soon and repeatedly. But why? When did having a book or comic or song or board game made into a movie become the cultural standard on which a work’s merit must be judged? Whcih isn’t to say that some adaptations aren’t great but not every story works as a movie.
I’m just finishing up reading The Three Musketeers and the second most striking thing about the book[3] is how it highlights just how all pale imitations of the source material all the film adaptations are. More than that, they never could be anything but second rate retellings of the story. It’s too big, too wide and to much to put in a single movie. A Television miniseries might do it justice, if it were on HBO or showtime. No timid Network would ever touch a story where the main characters were a bunch of wine-drunk sword fighters, manipulating mistresses for their living and picking fights with the guard of the Cardinal of France just for fun. The values-dissonance alone would drive the dimwitted TV audience of today into fits.
Catcher in the Rye would never work as a movie for a whole host of other reasons, mainly having to do with the fact that most of the book is just a running monologue of the main character’s rambling self loathing and whining. Yeah, I’m sure that will do well. Maybe they can run it against Avatar 2.
The point is, Catcher and Musketeers and a hundred other novels don’t need to be movies.[4] They work just fine as written. And if Hollywood started making real movies again and not just 3 hour long commercials for T-shirts and pop tarts, with nothing but gimmicks to prop up their lousy craftsmanship, maybe Salinger and other writers skeptical of what sort of a mockery would be made of their work wouldn’t be so fearful and reluctant to provide their talent to the dream factory.
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1. And besides, its influence on writing and film making is, for better or worse, already apparent, so the only reason to adapt it now is to cash in on Baby Boomer/Gen X nostalgia.
2. They’re making a movie out of Battleship. The board game. With the little pegs and plastic ships, where you bore each other for an hour calling out grid coordinates. Yes, that one. It’s bad enough that Hollywood has grown so risk adverse that they’re rebooting and remaking films that aren’t even old, but that they’d rather make a movie out of a board game than greenlight something original, just so they can have something familiar to tie into.
3. The most striking thing about the book is just how great it is. Here’s a sprawling adventure story full of swearing, fighting, lust, intrigue, sex, scandal, and gallantry. what’s not to love? Half the book is made up of the various ways D’artangion and the Musketeers get money from their mistresses and then piss it away on wine, gambling and doctor’s bills, all while swearing that they aspire to greater things. Athos keeps saying how he’s going to quit the Musketeers and join an abbey. He’s like all those Americans who keep threatening to move to Canada, only he’s also a bad ass poet and sword fighter.
4. Mine aren’t among them. Never let it be said I was too proud not to cash in. Call me Hollywood. The film rights can be yours.
My book club will be discussing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on Saturday so I thought I’d write out my discussion topics beforehand. Which is why this may read like a rambling and unfocussed sort of thing than a proper essay.
If you had not told me that Blade Runner was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I would have been hard pressed to guess that as the source material. “Loosely” based is an understatement. Riddley Scott may have glanced at the book sitting on a shelf. Once. Someone related to the film, possibly the second Grip or Best Boy’s third assistant, may have read the book and told someone a half-remembered plot synopsis. The book and movie overlap in that some characters share names and there are human-like androids hunted by bounty hunters. and that’s it.
Normally, this would be a sticking point for me but Blade Runner is such a good movie and Androids such a weird book that I don’t mind that they are essentilaly two different things. I’m glad Riddley Scott changed the title,[1] because it would have been confusing otherwise. Anyone sitting down to watch Blade Runner and expecting to see anything about Mercerism and Empathy boxes and Deckard’s preoccupation with owning a live animal would have been massively disappointed.
I could talk about the film all day long. It’s a classic that has held up remarkably well for a movie that is almost 30 years old. Few sci-fi films from the 80s can say that.
So. The book has a whole subplot about how fallout from the nuclear war[2] has made whole species and phyla already extinct, while the remaining real animals are highly sought after status symbols. Deckard, being just a poor cop who shoots androids for a living can only afford an electric sheep. Ersatz robot animals fill the need for the less fortunate and poor to own an animal, to have something to devote themselves to, as caring for a living creature is a sign of compassion and one of the dominant precepts of Mercerism, a new religion that Deckards wife, Iran is heavily into.[3]
Mercerism is such an obviously fake religion, even more so than Scientology, if you can imagine it. Over the course of the story, it’s even proven to be false, the empathic scenerio poeple experience when they use the empathy box to commune directly with mercer turns out to be just a series of short films made years before. It’s like a cult that watches clips of Charlie Chaplin films and builds a religion out of being kind to tramps. Very odd.
The whole Mercerism scam is uncovered by a popular radio/TV show host named Buster Friendly who is very clearly an android and runs a show that most poeple watch religiously. So it’s sort of a low grade religious war between Pop culture cults, The Little Tramp Vs. Coco. And, keep in mind, this is all just the subplot material.
The Andies[4] are depicted as grim, nihilistic sociopaths. You aren’t rooting for them in any way. Roy is barely there at all, certainly not the leering somber poetic replicant from the movie, who just wants more life. He and the rest of the Andies are pretty much resigned to the fact that they’re going to be hunted down and shot by Deckard and are just trying to prolong this from happening as much as they reasonably can, whicvh is not long at all. Pris shows up early and hangs out, manipulating a chicken head named Isadore.[5] Isadore really just wants to be liked and since he can’t even afford fake animals, he adopts the Andies and tries to take care of them.
As with many of Dick’s later novels, androids has a weird, anticlimactic mind fuck of an ending, in which the ghost of Mercer, the debunked ersatz prophet helps him shoot the Andies, then make shim drive to the deserted foreboding land of Oregon where Deckard finds a toad that he at first thinks is real, until he take sit home and his wife shows him that it’s electric. The End.
The movie bares so little resemblance to the book it was based on that it’s almost impossible to say that you prefer the book over the movie. That Blade Runner came from Androids, even in some weird distorted way, is one of those weird achievements of cinematic history that we’ll just have to marvel at. If pressed, i’d say I like the movie better, if only because it’s ambiguity and narrative structure is a lot more thought out and elgantly conveyed. Philip K. dick was not exactly a prose stylist and some of his sentences are clunkier than they aught to be, some of his ideas even more so.
Not that the book is without merit. Androids has some really great examples of those oddly charming anachronisms you find in mid-20th century sci-fi. The cops use laser guns but carry around blurry printouts of duty sheets. Videophones are in every home and flying car. There are weird, borderline telepathic mood enhancing machines, ubiquitous celebrity driven programming but no internet, and of course it’s 2019, and the Soviet Union is still alive and kicking. A strange and halucinatory mixture of the profound and the kitsch, all duking it out to save your soul, so long as you’re human and can prove it.
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1. There’s an interesting story in itself: there apparently is another book titled Blade Runner, about futuristic black market organ trading, (which sounds an awful lot like Repo Men, quite honestly). Scott apparently bought the film rights to that now-obscure book solely because he liked the title. I wonder how the author of this now obscure book feels about that? Searching any bookstore oronline will land you hip-deep in a nest of the movie’s fandom.
2. That, in good old Phildickean fashion, no one really remember. The details are all a bit fuzzy for the characters, even the ones who aren’t chicken heads, but it’s generally regarded as this unavoidable natural disaster that happened int he past and is just one of those things. The slow death of a planet caused by humanity’s uncontrollably need to destroy things.
3. Oh right, Deckard has a wife. She’s not in the movie, as it would be too complicated. He still sleeps with Rachel though, but the dynamics of that relationship are completely reversed. Rachel in the book is an emotionally manipulative sociopath who pretty much seduces Deckard (who in tern lets her for reasons that are only slightly creepy) because she cana nd then kills the goat he baught with the bounty money he earned offing a few other androids. Deckard and Rachel don’t run off together but neither does Deckard rape Rachel, as he doe sin the movie.
4. They’re only called Replicants in the movie, and referred to as Andies or Androids in the book.
5. Isadore fills the role of JF Sebastianin the movie. Chicken heads are basically people who are too damaged genetically to be allowed to immigrate to the off-world colonies. Isadore is a retarded manchild who realizes a little too late that he’s being jerked around by Pris and Roy. He’s not a super smart geneticist with a disorder like Sebastian but just a not too bright guy who works for a fake animal hospital, pickign up and repairing malfunctioning electric pets. He has one of the saddest scenes in the book, where he picks up a sick real cat and doesn’t realize it’s owner thought they were a real vet until the animal dies.
