It’s all over the net but if you haven’t seen it yet, watch the video of Stephen Colbert ripping the Bush Adminsitration and their lapdog Press a new one at the White House correspondents dinner. It’s pure comic genius with a dash of truthiness.
Following up the article from a few weeks ago showing the Gothic subculture fosters a supportive environment for psychologically sensative teens, turnig them away from suicide rather than towards it, comes this article about how Goths tend to grow up to be successful, well adjusted adults, but with a better sense of fashion and creative leanings:
Dr Dunja Brill, a 32-year-old German with her own Gothic tendencies, studied the subculture in Brighton, Edinburgh, Berlin and Cologne for her doctorate in media and cultural studies at Sussex University.
[…] Her interviewees included medical doctors, a man who had pursued a lucrative career in the law before becoming a musician, a bank clerk and an architecture student. The bank clerk was free to dress in black because her job did not involve coming into contact with customers, although like many professional Goths she reserved more extreme hair and make-up for club nights out.
“The Goth lifestyle allows you to lead a perfectly sane, stable lifestyle with a proper job, your own flat and even a family, then at the weekends or in your leisure time follow your Gothic activities,” said Dr Brill.
Many Goths choose jobs in the creative industries, academia or social work, where they are allowed more freedom to pursue their identity, but most are willing to make compromises.
“There is this idea in the subculture of being a proper full-time Goth, but that’s incompatible with holding down certain kinds of jobs. Most Goths who stay Goths and get proper jobs tend to make compromises but keep as much of the classic black and white clothing as possible. A white shirt and black suit corresponds to the Goth personality. It’s easier than being a Punk. Most Goths are very neat. They’re quite vain. Especially for the women, long black dyed hair is perfectly okay. It’s more difficult for a man.”
While many subcultures buck against the system in every way they can, Goths embrace classical education.
“Going to do a university degree is encouraged. It doesn’t encourage people to drop out of school. Whereas in the Punk scene you turn down the normal educational values, in Goth you gain status if you’re perceived as being educated. You get people who are in it for the shock value, but they are usually the ones who grow out of it,” said Dr Brill.
“The scene has quite middle-class values - education, highbrow culture, theatre, museums, romantic literature, poetry, philosophy, Gothic architecture. Many Goths like classical music. It’s a status symbol to have a good collection of classical pieces - mostly requiems and darker pieces,” she added.
The article goes on to give a thumbnail sketch of the history of the subculture, which is pretty spot on and entertaining.
Today, I catalogued a glorious thing, a first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. Being a bookish sort (a bookish Librarian? Do I repeat myself?) I couldn’t help read the first page or twenty. What struck me was the profound sense that here, in my hands, was a book that I was sure George W. Bush has never read. I’ll bet money on it. Seriously. If you can tell me honestly and truthfully that the Codpiece Killer has read this book and still thinks War in general and the bloody heap of the one in Iraq in particular is worth anything, fifty bucks is yours.
I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five before. It’s one of my favorite books, one of those that has had a profound effect on me and my life, not just my writing. Every time I read it, I’m reminded of the madness and death that Kurt Vonnegut and millions of people have seen and are seeing, right now. And it hurts. You read Slaughterhuse-Five and if you have, you know what I’m talking about: that raw exposed nerve that you can’t help but fondle, gently at times, other times, you bash it like a drunk dentist with a rusty hook. You don’t read Slaughterhouse-Five and come away with a good opinion of war. Maybe that raw pain fades and you no longer feel nauseous at the idea of killing people. Fine. You’re less human for it, but hay, the world needs robots, apparently.
Somewhere, very likely in the vicinity of Fox News Channel or the White House (again, do I repeat myself?) there is someone right now who has accepted in their heart the idea that some human being has the power to wage a peaceful war, one in which no one gets hurt. This ignoramus has accepted George W. Bush as their personal savior. They have renounced reality in all its multiform beauty and tragedy and embraced a cult of personality the likes of which this country has never seen before. And they have not read Slaughterhouse-Five. How could they? If they had, they’d know that Bush has an asshole just like everyone. Only, he has a rare condition where his asshole is in the lower middle half of his face rather than nestled between his buttocks. That’s why he always looks like he’s just smelled something bad.
These same people of faith claim that I and others like me who are opposed to War as a general principle and the Iraq War in particular are defective humans. That we somehow aren’t right in the head because we think that mauling other people and turning them into rotting meat is a bad thing. They don’t understand how we can find the idea of burning someone’s flesh off with chemicals a nauseating prospect. This is because they’ve smelled what comes out of the hole beneath Bush’s nose for so long, they can no longer tell when something stinks.
Because once you accept George W. Bush as your personal savior, you no longer have to put up with the burden of compassion or empathy. You also get to ignore people with different opinions, people who still can think for themselves and feel familiarity with other, different humans. These people scare me because they are loud, obnoxious, vote and have never read Slaughterhouse-Five, or anything. They’re probably planning on banning it from the Public Library so that their junior ADHD brat won’t accidentally skim a few pages and have a thought or two.
You’ve all heard of the Indian Rope Trick, I’m sure. That’s the one where a magician hurls a rope into the air where it catches on some invisible force and hangs, as if descending of its own volition from the sky. The Magician’s boy climbs the rope and disappears. In some versions, the boy reappears from another place, such as a basket in full view of the audience, sometimes he does not return at all.
A more gruesome variation involves the Magician chasing the boy up the rope with a giant knife and them both disappearing, followed shortly thereafter by screams and the boy’s severed limbs and body parts falling piece by piece back down to earth. The Magician descends, tosses the body parts in a basket, says an incantation and the boy reappears from the basket, unharmed.
It truly is a marvelous trick. Or would be, except that the whole story is a hoax. Peter Lamot, in his book, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became a History, details the intricate web of stories, myths and hoaxes that surround this infamous trick, and how it has never been preformed, only told by people who know someone who know someone who saw it happen years ago, or maybe it was a story their uncle told them when they were a child.
The myth surrounding the trick is even more interesting than the trick itself. Teller (the silent part of Penn and) wrote a fascinating acount of the hoax and it’s history:
In 1890 The Chicago Tribune was competing in a cutthroat newspaper market by publishing sensational fiction as fact. The Rope Trick — as Lamont’s detective work reveals — was one of those fictions. The trick made its debut on Aug. 8, 1890, on the front page of The Tribune’s second section. An anonymous, illustrated article told of two Yale graduates, an artist and a photographer, on a visit to India. They saw a street fakir, who took out a ball of gray twine, held the loose end in his teeth and tossed the ball upwards where it unrolled until the other end was out of sight. A small boy, ”about 6 years old,” then climbed the twine and, when he was 30 or 40 feet in the air, vanished. The artist made a sketch of the event. The photographer took snapshots. When the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, just the fakir sitting on the ground. ”Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn’t hypnotize the camera,” the writer concluded.
The story’s genius is that it allows a reader to wallow in Oriental mystery while maintaining the pose of modernity. Hypnotism was to the Victorians what energy is to the New Age: a catchall explanation for crackpot beliefs. By describing a thrilling, romantic, gravity-defying miracle, then discrediting it as the result of hypnotism — something equally cryptic, but with a Western, scientific ring — The Tribune allowed its readers to have their mystery and debunk it, too. Newspapers all over the United States and Britain picked up the item, and it was translated into nearly every European language.
Other explanations form eyewitnesses eventually reveal that they only ever saw the end of the trick. One popular account tells of a British couple traveling in India. They visit the bizarre where they meet a Fakir’s assistant who tells them to hurry along and come and see the Indian Rope trick being preformed, right now. They reach the place in time to see the rope fall to the ground and several enthusiastic onlookers applaud the fakir and throw him money (which he very likely paid them to throw). The imagination of the couple convinces them that they saw the trick preformed, even though all they saw was a rope tossed by an assistant from a balcony. They simply imagine the parts they missed.
Rupert is off to the vet today for a little snip snip. And he doesn’t even know what he’ll be missing. Which is a good thing. If he had discovered what his balls were for, then we’d really be in trouble.
The Cat and Girl Book is upon us! Oh, drown your ephemeral woes in biting wit! Drink Paint! Snark! Bask and join us, the Future Corpses of America.
Over at Making Light the discussion of the horrible exercise in copyright violation and common sense has diverged into a discussion about how all literature is fanfic, whoopee!
I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.
There’s quite a difference between using standard tropes and techniques and writing fanfic. One is purely derivative by definition, the other is making use of the basic stock storytelling elements of our language and psychology to tell a story. I’m not dismissing fanfic altogether, it serves a vital role in the creative ecosystem. So do termites and roaches. One makes compost, the other provides communities that serve as a proving ground for learning the basic mechanics of story telling. Everything plays a part. And then you grow up and have an original idea or at least an original take on a pre-established concept that provides fresh incite. Fanfic does not provide fresh incite (certainly none of the fanfic I’ve ever seen) it just fiddles with the details and adds noise to the background. Which is fun and a good laugh. So long as you don’t try to publish it. Because we don’t live in antiquity, where every variation on the Hercules story is a valid expression of creativity. We live in the modern world where companies with deep pockets and mean lawyers protect their entertaining property.
When I was a wee lad, I saw this strange Japanese film on TV. It was part of the Saturday Afternoon Matinee that has been a major influence on my creative aspirations over the years. But unlike the other Saturday Afternoon fair like Buck Rogers or the old Flash Gordon Serials, all I remembered for years about this movie was a haunting unreality, a sense of dread as these characters ran around, slowly turning into Mushroom People.*
Recently I decided to put this here Internet to the test and see if I could track down information about this movie, maybe even dig up an old VHS copy so that I could see if it really was as weird and fun as I remembered. Sure enough, Matango (US title: Attack of the Mushroom People) has an IMDB entry and was recently reissued on DVD.
The film was made in 1963 by Toho Company Ltd., the same studio that made Godzilla. In fact the director, Ishiro Honda, made his name directing many Kaiju, most notably, several of the subsequent Godzilla films.
But Matango is something altogether different. The Wikipedia entry mentions the odd parallels between Matango and Gilliagan’s island, with the seven castaways representing the seven deadly sins. Which is intriguing, though in tone and ambience, the film is much more in the vein of Lost, but with mushrooms.
The sense of dread and something intangibly odd is present from the beginning, and at several points, could run off into a typical monster movie direction (going into the haunted house, answering the evil telephone and stopping mid escape to have sex so the bloodthirsty maniac can catch up), but instead, this film subtly subverts all of those tropes. Though, I guess subverting them is the wrong idea; the movie predates most horror films and so most horror film cliches and so isn’t consciously subverting any of them. But we’ve come to expect lazy writing wearing it’s metaphors inside out in an attempt to appear post-modern or Ironic with a capitol I, and so we often expect there to be certain monster movie cause and effect scenes. Matango instead lets the character’s drive the story to the inevitable conclusion, skirting into the monster movie world, but staying close to the blurry edges so that it still overlaps the naturalistic world. This way, we manage to get most of the way through the film before the men in rubber suits show up. We see their silhouettes and brief glimpses of them but just enough to make the full out Mushroom mayhem at the end seem plausible rather than contrived. In this sense, it has a nice Lovecraftian turn to it, slowly pushing us int the fantasy world one twist at a time, so that when we realise we’re in a monster movie, it’s too late and we have had some moments of genuine suspense.
Of course, the movie isn’t perfect. Some of the editing is weird and jumpy. It’s hard at times to tell if this is a stylistic choice to heighten the sense of disorientation or just technical flaws (the infamous Toho Style) showing through. What is most striking though is the bleak tone. The characters overtly critique Japanese society and civilization as a whole, ultimately deciding that maybe we’d all be better off in the jungle eating mushrooms instead of living in the soporific splendor of Tokyo (or New York, or Los Angelas or Savannah…). This sort of nihilistic edge is hard to find in any film, let alone one made in 1963.
I give it 4 out of 5 stars for some MST3K worthy dialogue in the first act and the minor technical flaws. Maybe it should be rated a half star lower, but I’m biased, due to it being part of the creative influence from my childhood. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, weird and utterly creepy movie.
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* These half remembered images of lugubrious mushroom people and the beshroomed forest in which they lived found their way in to my novella, The Machine of the World. Everything is inspiring.
Over at Making Light, Theresa Nielsen Hayden brings to light one of those fleeting internet phenomena, a piece of self published Star Wars Fanfic. For sale on Amazon. Another Hope, is being sold by it’s frighteningly clueless author, Lori Jareo. In her “Author Interview” (which I suspect is her asking herself questions) we find this little gem:
Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?
No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.
My jaw has gone all slack at the gaping stupidity. Luckily, John Scalzi has all the salient criticism about how some one, especially someone purportedly an editor for their very own poetry publishing house should know better than to think this is just peachy and won’t George Lucas just get a kick out of it:
This would be bad enough if this woman were just some clueless person letting off some Mary Sue steam and then getting the idea that, gosh, this could be a real live book, but in fact Ms. Jareo purports to be a professional editor — which is to say she really has no excuse. In her interview Ms. Jareo mentions something along the line of “George Lucas says as long as no one is making a profit, tributes are wonderful,” but I think she rather seriously misapprehends what Lucas almost certainly means here. Leaving aside the fact that even if Lucas tolerates a little geekery on the down-low, he’s still fully invested in his copyrights and can enforce them at will and at whim, there’s the issue of scale. Geeking out with little stories of Yoda and Chewbacca on the Wookiee Planet on a personal Web site that’s visited by your friends is one thing. Publishing an unauthorized Star Wars novel via your publishing company and putting it up for sale on Amazon (not to mention Barnesandnoble.com and Powells.com) is really quite another.
I’ve said before I think fanfic is generally a positive thing for any science fiction universe, but I don’t think being a fan means you suddenly have a license to be stupid. Publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online is just plain stupid, and publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online when you’re theoretically a professional editor is just about as stupid as you can get without actually receiving head trauma from a tauntaun. If Ms. Jareo is lucky, she’ll only get smacked with a Cease and Desist order from Lucas. If she’s not lucky — say, Lucas wants to provide a cautionary example to ambitious-to-the-point-of-oblivious fanficcers everywhere — she and her company are going to get their asses sued, and given the blatant and obvious and self-incriminating copyright violations here, she should be thankful if she gets out of it without all of her assets, and the assets of her publishing company, encased in carbonite.
As it stands I think it’s worth it to start a pool on how long it takes for Ms. Jareo’s book to get pulled from Amazon. I’ll say this next Monday by 3pm Pacific. Any one else want to bet?
