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“Transplanting mice and throwing them at Iraq.”
2003-03-23 23:49:21
The comment in the title line above is from a colleague at the last Sickle Cell Consortium meeting. As he was starting his presentation, he introduced one section with a word or two on the grant he’d finished submitting on that work just previously. Apparently, he hadn’t heard back about it yet, which was…not bad, but not real positive either. Then he mentioned that the data from the latter half of his presentation had also been submitted for a grant. “And that one…well…it’s already been turned down.”
To which my advisor commented “Obviously you’d forgotten to include the critical “Homeland Security” angle.”
“Yeah, ‘transplanting mice and throwing them at Iraq.’”
OK, I’m going to issue a warning right here. In this post I am going to discuss current politics and the war in Iraq. If all you want is to read the harmless little fritterings of my usual missives, read on until the stuff about Iraq starts up, and then skip down to the reviews. I’ve noticed a pronounced recalcitrance among friends and in online message boards to talk about what can hardly be called other than the most important political question of the modern day. This recalcitrance seems to be born of a fear that one’s political opinion will divide one up from one’s friends, a deep suspicion that one isn’t as well informed as one should be to make strong statements on one side or the other, and a worry that one might find themselves ostracized, criticized, or ridiculed for holding the less popular view in the forum, whichever that might be. In a few embarrassing cases, it seems to be born of the belief that everyone can see the self-evident “right” conclusion, and anyone else wouldn’t be literate enough to make it onto the internet. So everyone sort of glides along in a peculiar silence, making instead safely neutral statements like wishing well for America’s troops, regardless of the nature of conflict, or declaring carefully-worded allegiance to one side or the other, but not wanting to partake in any discussion lest A) propaganda be passed off as fact when it’s impossible to tell B) debates get heated enough to sunder long-standing friendships or C) extrapolating, incorrect assumptions are made about the person’s other ideas and beliefs based on their support of one or the other side.
I’ve been following along those same lines, not issuing strong stances to one side or the other, only stepping in whenever errors of fact are made that I know should be corrected, and been gliding along on top of these issues for a while now. This, despite the fact that I actually do have very strong opinions on this issue. Well, I’ve finally decided to stop being such a chicken-shit. My AMV journal used to be a fairly interesting read, not because I live a shockingly exciting life, but because I’d discuss stuff here a little deeper than the usual dross. Recently, though, I’ve degenerated to a few weekly anecdotes and a review of a cheesy horror flick. I know for a fact that I have friends on both sides of this debate, ranging from the hesitantly-sided moderates to the radical extremes in either direction. However, I like to think that I have good taste in friends, and they all have sufficient character and willingness to consider and tolerate other ideas that my expression of a strongly-held opinion will not result in a galvanization of the ranks in those who agree or an ostracization from those who don’t. In other words, my friends aren’t gonna kick me to the curb for my political beliefs, however they differ from theirs, because they aren’t my friend for the sake of my party membership. If they do, then I suppose I didn’t really want to be their friend anyway.
Anyway, before we get to that, other events of the past week and a half…
Hung out for Patrick’s b-day party last night. It was good fun, although I got pulled into a game of Halo on the X-box that lasted a lot longer than it should have (sorry guys). I’d played Halo before, but not to the extent that I actually started sorting out the controls to the point I could use them reflexively (like I can with FPShooters on the keyboard / mouse). That made all the difference, and I now rather like the game. (Actually, what made all the difference was when I figured out how to work the sniper rifle. *Pink* *Pink* *Pink*. Daymn.) Didn’t get as drunk as I’d have liked to (need to remember to tell Sheryl next time to make me something that doesn’t taste of butterscotch. I hate butterscotch) but it was all for naught, as I left hours after I’d regained full sobriety.
Two weeks before that I went to the Shakespearian Tavern for a dinner show. A friend of mine got two free tickets from the Atlanta area Sci-Fi club, and the person she usually went with cancelled on her (opening and closing the store that week) so she offered it up to me. It was great fun. Basically think of the old Globe theater Shakespeare originally wrote plays for. There’s the tiny stage (maybe 15’ deep and 30’ wide) with a hard-built (non-removable) “house-like” structure in the background with two small (5’ by 7’) stages in second floor balcony/window structures for balcony scenes. The audience in the old Globe (If we are to trust “Shakespeare in Love”) surrounded the stage from a little less than three sides, all gathered up in the standing room on the bottom floor. A balcony area supplied elevated seating for those who didn’t want to stand. Now, take that and cut it down by about half. The standing room was, instead, filled with a bunch of wobbly old wooden tables, and the balcony (what I could see of it) looked to hold the same. All in all, I think the place would hold under 110 audience members if it was packed full. We got a seat right up front (the Sci-Fi club let me since this was my first time there…I asked if I should worry about a “splash zone” but they weren’t showing Troilus and Creseda.) and I literally had to pull my feet in once or twice to make sure the actors had sufficient room to get by when exiting around the stage. Dinner was served in the back and you got your meal cafeteria-style, walking along and picking out what you wanted while the servers assembled it for you. It was pretty neat, as they were trying for authentic Elizabethan pub food, so there was Shepard’s pie, Cornish pasties, and the like. There was also Guinness on tap, which was a godsend, although I think I’ve come to prefer it from a can. (Guinness is better from a can than a bottle, because the nitrogen bubbles from the brewing process which forms the distinctive head tend to escape from capped bottles, but not sealed cans. A tap doesn’t provide a smooth enough pour for my taste, and the resultant “boil” of foam that cascades like those cheap sand-paintings-between-glass tend to filter out and collect the particulate in the beer that gives it it’s distinctive bite, and concentrate it all in the head, leaving the beer itself a little bland.) You get your food, eat for maybe half an hour, then the play starts, and at intermission you can go and get some dessert. (The kitchen is closed while the play runs, to cut down on noise.) The play this time was Julius Caesar. Not my favorite of Shakespeare’s work in the text (I’d never seen it performed but had read it) but the actors did manage to bring it to life. No major fumblings of lines or anything unprofessional of the sort, they pulled it off quite well, especially Marc Antony’s superb control of the crowd, and the representation of an enormous crowd with only five or six actors (a fairly small company) scattered among the audience. The only real quibble is that they were in Elizabethan period costumes instead of togas. That’s a minor thing, though, and I didn’t even mark on it after the first five minutes in. It occurs to me that the modern audience might have lost all connection with the entire genre of “tragedy” in modern film, people greatly preferring the sudden turnabout of fates typical of action flicks whereby the hero comes out unscathed in the end rather than contemplation of a great leader dead or the disastrous consequences that befall someone by mere happenstance. Eh.
Between these two weeks was yet another reason to get soused, as we celebrated Tom’s birthday and an early St. Patrick’s at a local “Irish” pub. I put the Irish in quotes as, other than the menu, it didn’t feel exactly Irish in environ. (Although I’ve only got a few visits to an establishment to a bar heavily frequented by Irish-Americans in Baton Rouge to go by.) This was more than made up for by my introduction to the culinary masterpiece known as “Beef and Guinness pie”. (Little-one track here.) We bugged the live singer to do “Don’t Fear the Reaper” for Tom, and then headed out to try and track down a mini-golf place. I lagged a minute too long and lost track of the convoy, eventually having to turn back homeward, but I understand the place was closed anyway and they called it a night.
A week or so ago, my parents, during a visit home, brought up that they might be moving soon. My dad’s looking at a new job, but it’s clear on the other side of town. My mom’s job is pretty far in town as well, and they’re considering moving midway between and splitting the distance for everyone’s commute. Weird thing is, they’ll actually be moving closer to me. My mom thought I might have some attachment to the old house, but, truth be told, it’s always been an annoyance to me. It was a nice enough house, but it was always entirely too open for my tastes. Sound from the TV at one end of the house would be crystal clear all the way at the other and make reading hideously annoying. I didn’t really “grow up” in that house, either, so “childhood memories” hold no special attachment either. The house I DID grow up in back in Indiana I do have an attachment to, but we’ve been out of that house for nearly 15 years.
Caught the latest induction to the Rock and Roll hall of fame last week. They inducted “The Righteous Brothers,” “The Police,” “The Clash,” “AC/DC,” and Elvis Costello in. I’m presuming that all the inductees for the next decade or so have already been chosen so that the hall can keep itself in the public eye for longer, rather than just bringing in all the worthies at once, and adding only when a modern band proves itself worthy. My thoughts on the inductees: The Righteous Brothers always annoyed the hell outta me. They were the exact definition of the point in films when all the “mushy romance” started and I knew as a kid that I’d either be bored to tears or shooed out of the room by the adults. Enough of that impression hung on to me that I still flip channels whenever one of their songs comes on. That, and the fact that their songs are fucking LONG. Barry White was always at least entertaining in that his voice was so damn deep, but these two were just boring. I’m sure they deserve to be inducted, but I’m glad they didn’t perform. Elvis Costello and the Attractions were introduced with a remarkable amount of profanity by Elton John, which I thought was pretty nice of him, and entirely deserving. (Elvis shot back with a joke on stage, thanking Elton for that “kind and deeply profane” introduction.) I was never cool enough to know about Elvis Costello when he was really big (remember, I entirely missed the 80’s). I only know him from reputation, and, frankly, the way they introduced each inductee, didn’t help me understand him any better. They did a song or two on the show, and those I liked, but, again, I’ve just got nothing to go on with him. In principle, I like him, and I love the fact he’s inducted. I just wouldn’t be able to respond to anyone who challenged his induction. He also admitted to past clashes between members of the band, but said that this was hardly the time or place to open old wounds. The Clash got two introductions from two speakers, one of whom decided to take the only nasty sidelong slash against world politics. They’re sort of in the same category as Elvis C. with me. Yeah, I knew their songs, several of which were inescapable even for me as a kid, but I never really realized they were “punk” until many, many years later. I have it on fairly good audio-snob authority that “London Calling” is one of the best punk albums ever made, but also that it’s the only good album The Clash ever made. Be that as it may, they probably deserve the induction for that album, although I’m betting that they got moved to the top of the list with Joe Strummer’s death late last year. Despite the snipe in their introduction, the band members themselves didn’t follow up with any political statements themselves, only Neal Young deciding to go off much later in the show. (Apparently…it seems there were some inductions that they didn’t bother broadcasting.) Next up, AC/DC. You know, I’ve always considered that if AC/DC were to build the house of rock, it would end up exactly like the black monolith from 2001. If ever there was a pure distillation of what hard rock is, it’s this band. Everything reduced down to that primal id at the Ur of rock. Un-nuanced, un-tailored, screw decorum, let’s rock. They and Elvis Costello were the real reason I wanted to watch the inductions at all. Unfortunately, they were introduced by Steven Tyler, who, I discovered, is the self-aggrandizing tired old queen of rock. (Not in the sense of being homosexual, but in the sense of the tired façade of showmanship attempting to portray a hip youth peeling away to reveal an ugly, pretending old man.) His intro of the group managed to mention Aerosmith three or four times, and when he came out on stage to sing “Highway to Hell” his screeching and off-time lyrics ruined the fucking song. Steve, get off the stage. Lastly, came The Police. (According to their introduction…The Police are punk? What? How out of it am I?) My favorite part of this was their introduction, because it was done by Gwen Stefani of No Doubt. I like Gwen Stefani. Not because she’s easy on the eyes, (although she is that…) but because of a confession she and her bandmembers made on an interview at some point. (I think it was on VH1-behind the music…which I used to watch regularly before they got to the point where they would consider doing a special on Hootie and the Blowfish?) Gwen Stefani is a geek. She said she feels like the band has “gotten away with something” by portraying themselves as these big punk rebels when they were the nerdy reject band-practice kids in High School. (Or something to that effect.) I really love that…and you can honestly hear it in her introduction of the band, or any time she talks publicly when not trumping up the punk image. Anyway, why she was chosen, I don’t know, although she did have a rather unflattering story about getting an autograph from Sting. For his part, Sting seemed to be the only person actually pissy about being there at all. They performed a couple of songs, but the magic really was gone. They noodled off in the end of “I’ll be watching you” and it sounded like all three of them were battling for attention in the music. Sting to be a bastard, and the other two trying to showcase their talent as a thumb in his eye. Sad really.
Hokay, enough of me. This is the part where those of you wishing to avoid conflict should skip down to the review. I hope, however, that my friends will trust me enough to listen to this whole spiel. It concerns something going on in the world that is very, very important, but which, due to people talking past one another, is ripping this country in half along political lines…a polarizing situation that will be to the detriment of everyone unless someone tries to clear up the differences.
Let me introduce you to something. It’s right over here, under the clutter and dust of my wracked kopf. Yeah, that’s a door. Go ahead and open it up. Kinda bare inside, isn’t it? Just a table and two chairs. Go on in, I’ll be with you in a moment. Seem to have stuck my foot in an old, wrecked ideal. Just gimmie a minute to pull out….there. There should be a light-switch on the other side of the room, but you’ll have to fumble for it. Damn. Sorry, shoulda remembered that was there. You OK? Alright, just let me get in there with you. Pick a chair, I just gotta close this door….and lock it…there.
This is my sound-proof box. The only thing in it is you and me. (And two chairs, a table, and an expired case of Shasta if you get thirsty.) No noise from outside can get in here. Your friends who all would offer up arguments or opinions to influence you are outside, as are all my friends who might do similarly. On a more positive note, all the idiots who claim to be your friends on some issue but hold such radical or stupefyingly simplistic viewpoints that you’d really rather not stand with them are trapped out there, banging on the walls. Yeah, I’ve got a similar bunch over here. You get to ignore the protestors with “Bush=Hitler” cardboard signs, and I get to ignore the “Fuck Africa, they deserve the AIDS epidemic for screwing 10-yr old girls” forum poster. I invited you in here because I want to discuss something very important with you. I wanted to discuss why I support the current military action in Iraq. It was necessary for us to come in here, because there is an enormous din going on about it out there, and it’s vastly clouding the issue. Here we can discuss this in relative peace. One thing is enormously important, however. I want you to understand that I am not trying to convince you to join my way of thinking. Instead, I merely want you to understand why I believe what I believe, and then I hope you’ll do the same for me, because I honestly do not understand your position. This box is an attempt at a mechanism whereby one can clearly define starting positions, because most of the argument going on outside is a result of misunderstanding due to people shouting the ENDPOINT of their reasoning at one another without explaining how they got there. This is what’s leading to the shouts of “commie” and “baby-killer,” “pro-Saddam” and “pro-corporation,” “It’s all about oil,” and “idiotarians.”
How’d that door get open? Just a sec. There. Where was I?
Oh yeah. See, in this room there is no preconception. Outside opinions will be entirely ignored, so we can handily disregard the protestors on both sides. More importantly, all facts about the outside world stay out there. Not because the facts aren’t important, but because facts are up for interpretation, analyzed for legitimacy, accuracy, and degree of representative-ness, so that the same fact might be held in support of diametrically opposed positions. Plus, there’s so freaking many of them. It takes hundreds of pieces of anecdotal evidence to approach evidence of a trend, and each anecdote might be debated individually. Facts are where the conversation starts to get complicated, where bits and pieces of questionable origin get tossed over one-another’s battlements like so-many mortars, and we sit waiting to see if we struck some essential part of this alien thought process that dare come to different conclusions than I. Therefore, in this room, we will speak only in generalities. I don’t know if this mechanism will actually work, but it’s a first draft at leveling the playing field for everyone.
We begin by tossing out preconceptions about one another. No bloodthirsty warmongers, no anti-American loony-left-wingers. Just two reasoning human beings laying out the interpretation of current events for one another. If, at the end of all this, we wish to actually debate, we can venture out into that hullaballo and bring facts into it. Likely we’ll fare better than most, since we know the basis of the disagreement, and will be able to address central precepts directly rather than the pell-mell method used by everyone else, but I wouldn’t blame you if you’d rather not. The degree of complexity is distressing. I’ve left a few forum topics at this point since I haven’t the energy to actually address every fact that has thus far come up.
Let’s start at the beginning of my perspective. Twelve years ago, during the UN-approved war on Iraq, Iraq was defeated fairly easily, albeit with enormous ecological damage. During this time, the outside world got a good look at Saddam, pretty much for the first time. What we saw, I don’t think anyone will disagree, was that Saddam was a remarkably evil (“bad” if you prefer) man. In fact, it turns out, we’d known this for a long time, but it had never really been brought to the forefront of our attention before. Despite this, Saddam was allowed to remain the head of the Iraqi state, on the condition that he concede to a list of conditions. I think this was a terrible betrayal of the Iraqi people by the international community that cared enough to free their neighbor (Kuwait) from Saddam’s rule. Knowing what was known at the time, Saddam should have been deposed. It was the right time, the armies were present, most of the Iraqi forces had surrendered. I am uncertain why this perfect opportunity was missed. This list of conditions was, effectively, the treaty that ended the first Gulf War. Most important for this discussion was the part of the agreement stipulating what weapons Hussein was no longer allowed to own. To make sure that Saddam was, in fact, following these agreements, the weapons inspectors were sent in. Something like 18 months later, after repeated attempts to get Saddam to cooperate with the inspectors fully, the inspectors left in protest, never having confirmed that Hussien had fully disarmed according to the treaty. Setting aside the ludicrousness of protesting a dictator by leaving him alone, the UN attempted to persuade Hussien to cooperate through the application of sanctions. Again, I think the fact it went on for ten years is another betrayal by the international community. Further, it looked to be entirely ineffective at persuading Hussien himself, as he built multi-million-dollar palaces all over the place while reporting that his people were starving under sanctions. Later humanitarian aid systems set up to relieve the starvation without lifting sanctions were at least partially corrupted into channeling money elsewhere.
Ten years later we get 9/11. No, I don’t think there is a direct cause-and-effect involved here between Iraq and the events of 9/11. It’s possible there was some sidelong effect via cash from Saddam towards Al-Queda, but I’ll come to that later. (And for the record, I don’t think that “Bush knew,” it was arranged by rich jews, or any of the other ludicrous conspiracy theories out there.)
The leap to Afghanistan was fairly straightforward. I’m not going to go into that, as it’s too cold in my memory at the moment to sum up properly.
Suddenly, via the investigations into 9/11, we start hearing about Iraq again. Why?
I don’t care.
See, this is a major sticking point with much of the pro vs. anti-war group and me. A lot of people are asking “Why are we looking at Iraq now? It’s been like that for ten years!” And then proceed to tear apart any and all reasons for going to Iraq now. My response is much simpler. “Why not now?” In my eyes, the fact that conditions as they are continued for ten years is a travesty we should have moved to correct a decade ago at the earliest. We had the power, the occasion, and the moral and legal right. And, because of political pressure from the UN, we didn’t do it.
Back to the sudden resurfacing of Iraq. The US, through Bush, goes to the UN to try and get UN approval for a second war on Iraq. This is where the problems are. They want to know “why now” as well, and he can’t tell them “because you fucked up ten years ago by allowing a sadistic tyrant to remain in power after he attempted to take over his neighbor” because that wouldn’t be diplomatic. So he comes up with a dozen new reasons, most important of which was non-compliance with the treaty Hussein signed. The US plunks down 50,000 troops on Iraq’s border and suddenly Saddam is willing to let inspectors back in.
Now. The inspectors have one job. Inspect. They are not a “weapons disarmament” team, they are only there to SEE if Saddam HAS IN FACT disarmed. When I first heard about this, I despaired of anyone ever actually doing anything about Saddam. Iraq, I considered, has enormous tracts of desert wherein one could hide JUST ABOUT ANYTHING for any length of time. Saddam could be making anything in there, and a couple hundred UN-appointed officials wouldn’t see a thing.
I.
Did not believe.
The inspectors.
Would find.
Anything.
I was ecstatic when they actually did find something. At first it was little dismissible things, but by now we have five or six solid examples of material breaches of the treaty. My reasoning, upon their finding these few items, was that either A) Saddam or the people he put in charge of hiding things was a complete fucking idiot or B) There was a hell of a lot of stuff to hide, and these few things got overlooked. I leaned heavily towards the second. This was strengthened by Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN wherein he gave detailed intelligence on material breaches. I do not feel, at this point, (March 22, not then) that anyone can reasonably doubt that Saddam Hussein broke the treaty he signed. I feel that this alone should have repercussions, and that, in light of his history, the only appropriate repercussion is the loss of power over Iraq by both him and his regime.
Now we come to a central point of contention. I do not think that Saddam Hussein would have ever given up his power under any conditions. Even if he had, he and the rest of his government would have only given it up if one of his sons could have taken it over. His sons, from their actions in public and intelligence reports in private, appear, if anything, to be even more sadistic than their father. Therefore, I feel that a war was the only way in which Saddam could have been removed from power. Assassination is a reasonable option, but A) difficult both politically and physically and B) ineffective, ultimately, as there was any number of petty tyrants tiered below him and his sons just waiting for their chance to step into his shoes. Assassination, even an extensive one, would be a roll of the dice…which, in and of itself, would be a further betrayal of Iraq, as you’re playing a game of chance with other people’s lives.
Back to the UN. Under constant prodding by the US, the UN then delayed, stalled, and twiddled their thumbs for a full year. Numerous bills condemning Iraq were passed, but always with strange, nebulous wording like “strong consequences.” These bills cannot be passed without consent of enough member nations, and, as with anything designed by committee, there’s a great deal of compromise involved. The problem is that this compromise kept leaving Saddam in power, kept asking for more time for inspections, and kept whittling away at the immediacy of the issue for the United States.
This is important to understand. The primary reason that the US did nothing about Iraq for ten years was lack of momentum. There was always the question “why now?” And when the answer came back “because it needs to be done” the response was always “let the UN do it, that’s their job.” Another bill would be passed at the prodding of the US, and nothing would come of it. Then 9/11 hit, and, all of a sudden, we had a hell of a lot of momentum. We (in this case the UN) went through Afghanistan (with UN approval) like a frickin’ tornado and cleaned out an antiquated, abusive, corrupt regime that was only about a half-step better than the sharia law practiced in some parts of the world. It was done with minimal civilian casualties, remarkable speed, and was, for almost all parts, a brilliantly successful military action. (I honestly believe that OBL was killed in Afghanistan. For the reason, I hope you’ll allow me to crack open the door a quarter inch to put a few facts together. The Columbia, carrying the first Israeli to travel in space breaks up on re-entry. A few days later, we get another recording of OBL, swearing that he is alive and well, and calling on all Muslims to kill Americans. But, here is the key thing, the leader of a radical, venomously anti-semetic, anti-Israeli sect wants to confirm to the world that he is alive and show the Muslim extremists that God is on their side, yet there is not a single mention of the death of the Israeli astronaut or the accidental destruction of a US space shuttle upon re-entry. No declarations of God striking the infidels from his heavens. Had there been a single word in that speech mentioning the Columbia, taking into account that voice analysts believe it was OBL’s voice, I would have believed that he was alive. There is no reason for the comment to have not been there, unless the real OBL is dead. “But he mentions Iraq!” Yeah, anyone could have predicted that. There’s probably a tape somewhere labeled “Iran…Saudi Arabia…etc.” with prepared speeches too. No one could have predicted the Columbia disaster, and that’s why it’s not on the tape. Remember, technically speaking, Hitler’s body was never recovered. It was burned by his officers so the allies could never be sure he commited suicide. OK, closing the door again.)
So why is it so important for the US to have momentum? Because, in any military action by the UN, the US is going to be providing the majority (or, at the very minimal, a plurality) of the personnel and equipment. The US, being a democracy, has to maintain the momentum of public opinion to complete an action. (I hold that the momentum of public opinion towards military action in response to 9/11 was maintained through the latest Senate and House elections whereby the Republicans won control of both houses, overcoming a sizeable margin against.) If the US isn’t behind it, it isn’t going to happen. Much of the European Union, specifically Germany and France, have allowed their military might to wane profoundly in favor of expensive social reform programs. (According to Dave Sim, one of those people I hesitate to stand by, a similar situation exists in Canada.) The problem is, though, that the UN cannot be behind a military action without a unanimous vote from the Security Council. Sitting on that Council is Russia, China, the US, France, and the UK. The problem is that with this grouping, a military action is certain to be directed at the ally of SOMEONE on the council, because nearly every nation on earth is allied with one or two of these guys. Only three wars have ever had UN approval. Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Korea…and Korea only came about because Vladimir Brezhnev was throwing a fit at the time and boycotting the UN.
This is the next essential point, and the one that most moderates are likely to disagree on. I do not think that the Security Council as it stands now would ever have approved another military action on Iraq. They practically had to approve the first action, because it was such an obvious move of aggression on a harmless neighboring state, just to grab up the wealth in the land. Alliances couldn’t help Saddam then. But they could now. There was no direct act of aggression involved, just 10 years of passive aggression through violation of the treaty. Still, why would anyone want to keep this bloodthirsty dictator in power? Wouldn’t everyone be better off without him? Nope. Let’s go round the table. US and UK are voting yes. China? Well, with a government that sequestered, with such a tumultuous history, it’s always hard to work out, but they may be blocking in order to try and limit US influence in the region. Set them aside. They might be convinced to vote yes. Russia? Iraq is 20$ billion in debt to Russia, and, if Saddam stays, actually in a good position to pay that back…taking the black market in oil into account. Further, Russia has always positioned itself as a counterbalance to the US, even long after they could physically be one. Now France. France is in something of an idealistic political and social turmoil. The last election, due to the splitting of the nomination vote between an ENORMOUS number of political parties and candidates, (the election is held between the two parties with the largest number of nomination votes) pitted Chirac against someone who could charitably be called “violently anti-Semitic” Le Pen. Chirac has been trying to make up for this PR disaster ever since, and has done so via unreasonably idealistic “peacemongering” that’s even gotten him nominated for a Nobel Peace prize. The US is pissed at him. It’s not that he doesn’t want to go to war, it’s that he won’t even consider its possibility. He insisted (literally stating) that he would automatically veto any bill concerning Iraq that advocated military intervention. Even now he is refusing to sign any bill giving aid to the civilian population of Iraq, for fear that it would be misinterpreted as “approval of the war after the fact.” When 22 states, many of them former Communist block nations only recently begun governing themselves democratically, signed a letter formally supporting the US suggestion that we use military might in Iraq, Chirac told them that they had “missed an excellent opportunity to stay quiet,” effectively threatening the EU hopefuls that they should shut up or risk their chances at getting into the EU. Chirac shows little sign of being even open to convincing. Further, Iraq is 5$ billion in debt to France, the same for Germany(whose economy is spiraling the drain). China, Russia, and France have also been handed large oil deals by Iraq VERY recently, likely as insurance against UN action.
Setting all this aside (which I don’t, but for the sake of argument) maybe it’s possible to convince all three of these dissenters. However, the action in the UN has convinced me that it will take a very long time to do so. By that time, the US will have entirely lost momentum, and the US representative, through the newly elected president, will be the dissenting voice.
So Bush decides to “go it alone” which, in this case, means “go in with troops from the US, and half a dozen other nations, and the official approval of 45 nations.” Just not UN approval. Someone noted that France’s petty obstinacy has destroyed the UN by letting the world “get a look inside the sausage factory.” (Mark Twain once said that those who love laws and sausages should never see either being made.) I, who never had a feeling one way or the other, no longer think that the UN works. Think about it. 45 nations approve, but five or six powerful nations in the UN do not. The UN was supposed to be set up to speak for all the nations, but is now controlled by a couple of obstinate bullies who are in power because of their former status. (Security Council was originally formed from those nations with nuclear weapons.)
Now the bad part. Bush has to explain all of this to the American people. Many of whom hate his guts more with every passing day. He had approval from congress over a year ago. But the reasons he gives the US for the military action are the crappiest ones available. He’s caught in a bind, and it will probably cost him the next election. He doesn’t want to dis the UN (as much as it deserves it) ‘cause that’ll look like he’s doing it just to spite them. He can’t say the real reason, we should have done this ten years ago, because A) it’ll look like he’s trying to live up to Daddy’s image and B) it’ll be alienating his own party, and his own father, by questioning their actions ten years ago. So he goes with the homeland security angle.
I hate Homeland Security. It’s a fancy way of saying that the FBI hasn’t been able to do its job competently for twenty years, but they hold too much political power to be cleaned out with a string of firings (the way they SHOULD BE) that hasn’t been seen since the Watergate days.
That said, while acknowledging that there are much better reasons for military action in Iraq (primary being that it’s ruled by a sadistic dictator who won’t leave any other way), do I believe what Bush said about Iraq’s funding of terrorist attacks on the US? The connections to Al-Queda? Hmmm. Maybe. It certainly sounds like the sort of thing Saddam would do. It may even be the actual reason that Bush is pushing this forward, on knowledge that can’t be made public yet. What I do know, is that of all the reasons for invading Iraq, this one has had the least solid evidence presented for it.
Know what?
I don’t care.
This is why all the anti-war protests keep falling on deaf ears in my intellectual neighborhood. I don’t care what the motivation for this war is. I know what MY motivation is, but as far as I know, maybe it is all about oil (OK, actually, no, I don’t think that’s even remotely possible, but just say…) maybe Bush is an imbecile / looks like a monkey / mad-crazy warmonger. When he does something A) stupid B) simian or C) warmongering with foreseeable bad consequences in the name of the US, I will be right there protesting with everyone else. However, I don’t think any of these three is really likely.
See, you don’t have to like Bush to be in favor of this war. In the real world, motivations don’t matter. If the cure for cancer is discovered by someone who just wants to be famous enough to get laid every weekend, he’s still discovered cancer. I’m not gonna wait for my cancer to get cured by a celibate monk in the Himalayas, I’ll go to the lush.
In this case, I don’t care what the motivation is, except in how it affects the results and the methods. The desired result, removal of Saddam, his sons, and his regime, I’ve already said I agree with. The method chosen is the only one that I think will actually GET US TO the desired result. And the method is being applied in a manner that will have the least possible net negative repercussions, ie., exerting our armed forces skills massively to avoid civilian casualties, damage to the country’s livelihood, damage or injury to our armed forces themselves, or damage to the country’s structure.
The moment I see movement away from any of these desired results, including any attempt to extort/take control of the oil trade away from the people of Iraq, then I will have been proven wrong, because the desired results were not the ones I was told of. I would hope that Iraq would be friendly towards us, both diplomatically and trade-wise, but I would be against any attempt to lean or enforce that.
So, to summarize. Saddam is a sadistic dictator we shouldn’t have allowed to remain in power. He and the government he’s set up will not leave under any form of persuasion short of a gun. He has repeatedly and purposely broken the treaty that allows him to remain in power, the one that supposedly prevents him from endangering his neighbors. The UN has become so utterly mired in idealistic (as in, “non-practical”) bureaucracy, that it will never approve a second military action in Iraq without Saddam attacking someone. The US has the momentum and military power to fix this situation, is already in the region, and is in favor of it for its own reasons, be they economic, personal or altruistic. The US shows every sign of going about this with a minimum of human tragedy.
Bush’s motivation for going to war in Iraq is likely not entirely altruistic. According to the protestors, it’s entirely selfish. But my support for the war is entirely altruistic.
If an anti-war person wanted to convince me that I was wrong on this issue, they would have to prove one of the following:
1) Saddam Hussein is not a sadistic bastard.
2) Iraq is not in violation of the treaty Saddam signed, nor any of the other UN resolutions passed on him.
3) Saddam Hussein could be “talked” into giving up the country and taking his entire regime with him.
4) The UN could actually get its act together long enough to approve military action in Iraq before the US lost the necessary momentum.
5) The US is incapable of winning this war in a speedy manner, with a minimum loss of life and livelihood.
6) The cost to the US is too great to consider this action.
The last was brought in by my lab-mate (a non-naturalized Greek) whose only objection to the war was that the US might drive its economy into the ground trying to save Iraq. I think the turnaround in the economy, prompted, no doubt, by the war, should end up paying for itself.
My support for the war exists because 1-6 is not true. If #2 was true, I would still support it through 1, 3-6. If #4 is true, then who cares, because we just did everything a year early. (I always consider whether an action or inaction is immoral before I consider if it’s illegal. The first is more important than the second.) If #5 is true, this is the worst case scenario, but not necessarily a reason not to try. If #6, it will be a massive sacrifice for another people. The only situation that would make me adamantly anti-war, would be if #3 or #1 was true.
You know, I’ve talked a hell of a lot here. But this whole thing can be summed up with a single voice. If you’ll allow me to crack the door one last time, we can listen to this one voice. I’m hoping you’ll allow it, because it belongs to an Iraqi, and it asks the single most important question of the entire war debate (IMHO). The voice is angry, and a little belligerent, but I hope that you’ll excuse it, as I think it has good reason to be. (It also uses a rather odd little colloquialism, but please ignore that.) Just listen to what he’s saying.
http://komo1000news.com/audio/kvi_aircheck_031003.mp3
Now it’s your turn. Please explain to me the anti-war position in a format similar to what I’ve demonstrated, so that I can properly understand why we disagree. I’ll allow two cracks in the door if you like, although that was mostly my dramatic flair at work there…neither were really necessary to my argument. (Non live-journal users, please e-mail me at gte106k@prism.gatech.edu)
And now….reviews!
(OH! SPIRITED AWAY JUST WON! YES! Eh… or so I’m told….don’t watch those self-aggrandizing ceremonies usually.)
Ahhhh…..the hell with it. I haven’t the energy left tonight.
-
Too tired for a title.
2003-03-14 00:55:48
I am in the weirdest mood.
I’ve had one Guinness (which tasted like ass) and now I’m just mellow enough to want to listen to slow jazz. And I hate jazz. It’s the only kind of music I just don’t like as a category, and for some reason I’m in the mood for it. ( I know it doesn’t make any sense. I like a lot of music that’s a direct derivation of jazz in one form or another, but I’ve always found classic jazz annoying to listen to. Oh, and don’t tell me that it’s because I haven’t heard good jazz. I’ve heard jazz at Preservation hall, so I’ve heard good jazz.)
It doesn’t help that I’m kinda drifting in limbo sleep-wise. I had to get up early on Wed in order to attend the Grand Rounds lecture given by Dr. Eckman at Emory Hospital at 7:30, plus I had to give someone a ride there, so that translated into getting up at 6:30. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t taken the previous night to get some AWA work put together and been up till 2:00. (The gaming session prior had run late, since we were playing with a friend who’d been consumed for months by his marriage and had only gotten the one night off to come and play with the old group.) Then, Wed turned out to be an experiment day, but I couldn’t start until after 5:00 due to a departmental seminar…which turned out to be cancelled. So the experiment lasted until 5:30 AM, which put me in bed by 8:00 AM. Crashed until 2:30 PM on Thursday afternoon. Went to work until about 6:00 PM. Now I’ve been up for less than ten hours, but it’s time to go to bed again. Figure in that I had a craving for Dr. Pepper (and all the caffeine that implies) right before I crashed this morning, and I think I’ve made my metabolism neurotic. Somehow, this “mellow” is the result.
Oh, it ain’t sleep-dep either. Sleep deprivation and I are old friends. I know all the stages of that, and I’m not even to the “piercing headaches to the base of the spine” stage.
I don’t know what I’m gonna do about this box set Jimmy lent me. I just watched another flick from it, which puts me at slightly better than the one-a-week rate I managed before, but tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s day, and there’s no way in hell that I’m gonna spend that venerated occasion sitting in my room watching a low-budget chiller from the seventies. Plus, I think my internal calibrations have been thrown wildly out of whack, ‘cause I’m enjoying them too much. Bad acting is just rolling off my back now, and if I get any more tolerant, I’m not gonna be much use as a movie reviewer to anyone. (Not that that’s my primary goal in life…but for my own personal edification I need to make sure I can tell the shit from the shineola.) Fortunately, “Willard,” the big-budget remake of that dirty rat from way back is coming out in theaters this weekend, and that should recalibrate me nicely. Which makes it another film on my list. AND Mike and Shelly promised to lend me their copy of “The Attic Expeditions,” a freaky film I read about and gleaned no information from in a Fangoria article. (Great pictures, horrible writing.) AND mount DVD has grown by two Hellraiser flicks, meaning that the only film in the series I don’t own is III…which is sold out on Amazon.com. Lotsa people out there with crappy taste.
Well, let’s see if I can buck the trend and do an honestly short review here.
The film outta that 5-disk set “Fright Night” that I watched tonight was “God Told Me To,” a cheap little piece of faux-sacrilegious thrill-flick from 1976, starring almost no one, except Sylvia Sidney in a bit part. Who’s Sylvia Sidney? She made a career out of playing “generic old woman with a big mouth” for the past twenty five years until her death in ’99. I knew I knew her from somewhere, and finally tracked it down to the grandmother from “Mars Attacks” or Juno (the death administrator) in Beetlejuice. Out of everything, that got my attention the most outta this flick. Why? ‘Cause the woman looks EXACTLY THE SAME in this flick as she looked in all the later movies I know her from. Must’ve been cryogenics or something.
Whenever I plan to do a review on something I’m watching, I always keep a slip of paper or three nearby to jot down any witticisms I come up with. This time around I think a few notes summarize my feelings on the film quite concisely. Let’s see…*ahem*
“What?
Stillborn children?
What the hell is going on?
I am LOST.
Going somewhere?
LOST, LOST, LOST.”
Yeah, the story got rather confusing at points. Here’s the breakdown. We start with an uncomfortable parallel to the DC sniper when a young college boy climbs to the top of a water tower in downtown NY and begins picking people off in the streets below. Other than the Son of Sam killings (vastly different) and the Tower of Death (Texas student sniper) events, I’m not familiar if there was any events of the time to prompt such a plot device. (I think the Texas events were much later anyway.) In a touch of realism, the press, discovering the boy’s name, mange to roust his mother and interview her, at which point she declares that it couldn’t possibly be her son who did all the killings and it must be a police coverup. Anyway, a negotiator gets close enough to the boy to talk for a few minutes, at which point he gives his reason for the shootings. “God Told Me To” Then he does a full-gainer onto the pavement seventeen stories down.
This would be nothing special, except it keeps cropping up elsewhere. We follow the cop around as he investigates, in classic Starsky-and-Hutch fashion, a series of serial killers who just picked up a knife or a gun, went into a crowd, and started killing. An old man at a market, a cop in a parade (holy crap…it’s Andy Kauffman! Really!), a man who shot his wife and two kids, etc. And they all say the same thing, that God told them to do it. (By which they specifically mean the Christian God, they make a point of that.) The cop hunts around a bit, and finds out that a couple of people saw each of the killers talking to a young man beforehand with shoulder-length blond hair who went about barefoot.
And those in the audience of the Christian religion roll their eyes. Here we go again. Jesus is walking the streets coaching serial killers. Yeah…
So, anyway, the cop gets a name outta one of the witnesses, and starts tracking the blond fellow. ‘Cept there’s practically no records of it. Along the way he leaks stuff to the press, and the show gets a solid shot-glass full of blacksploitation when his partner gets killed.
The flick could have gone one of three ways here. A) It’s God! And he’s coaching serial killers! Let’s get notoriety out of insulting people’s values! B) It’s the antichrist! We’re predictable! C) Something different, but lame. They went for C). The cop finds records of an apparent “virgin birth” in place of the stranger’s birth certificate. But he reads an interesting account filed on the mother. Something about being taken up into the sky, and there were figures all around, and appearing across the state less than an hour later. Yup. Alien abduction. Our new Jesus here is an alien. Hell, our old Jesus was an alien. And God. Etc. To it’s credit, it doesn’t feel like the flick is trying to bee directly offensive, just reframing everything with little regard for convention or offense, as many 70’s movies do.
The new Jesus even has a national conglomerate working for him, people who follow his every whim, or drop dead if they piss him off. The cop intercepts one of them, and persuades him to take him to see “God.” (God, in turn, persuades the tour guide to decapitate himself in an open-structure service elevator.) Problem is that God seems pretty spooked by the cop. Apparently can’t control him. Then we find the reason behind it. The cop’s ALSO an alien, who was put up for adoption as an infant. He finds out his similar heritage by tracking down his mom (Sylvia Sidney) and interrogating her (the abduction could best be described as a “bad Barbarella experience”), and develops his own power by wandering back on to the set of another Blacksploitation flick, where, incensed at the constant “jive turkey” comments, takes psychic control of one of the “brotha’s” and kills everyone available in the bar.
Finally, he tracks his half-brother down to an abandoned tenement house, where he confronts “God,” or, as we know him, “David Bowie.” (*sigh* no, not really, but he really looks like the Goblin King on a bad hair day.) In perhaps the only less-than-laughably-clumsy sacrilege, the new Jesus lifts up his robe, and we see the “wound in his side” is actually an alien mouth/vaginal organ, with which “he” (ambiguity over the sex of the baby was a major point prior) offers to bear the cop’s children. Whoa…gettin’ freaky here.
Fortunately, the cop discovers his half-brother’s weakness…hurting him! He then brings about the end of the mad alien’s reign of terror with a vigorous slap-fight that eventually collapses the building. He himself gets arrested for the murder, but no one else catches on that it was an alien.
So, is the movie any good? Well…the major plot twist did catch me by surprise. I kept flipping between the “alien” and the “antichrist” concepts while watching, but the cop’s family tree caught me solidly by surprise…mostly due to clumsy writing that took me until ten minutes after the fact to sort out what exactly had happened. (I thought the cop had been possessed or something at first.) Is it offensive to Christians? Eh. Only a little, despite a few solid efforts. There’s a science writer who tries to piss off the church, the whole labeling God as an alien astronaut, reference to Abraham and Isaac as predecessors to God-sponsored serial killers, and a weird-ass sidelong comment to a Jewish member of the “new Jesus corporate consortium.” In all, only the “wound in the side” trick showed any really interesting creative initiative in the “shock and offend devout Catholics” category, and that only after you think about it. (“Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” John 20:27)
In style and a lot of the substance, this film reminds me of the first “Scanners,” David Cronenburg’s 1981 flick about psychic DBZ fights. (Lotsa yelling, staring really hard at people, and veins popping up on one’s foreheads.) In fact, this film could be entirely interpreted as “Scanners gets a messiah complex.” The wound is especially Cronenburgian, reminding me of the tumors of “The Brood” or the…thing from “Rabid.” Those, however, were good movies. When everything was said and done, I had one important question. So God was actually an alien, Jesus was one of their “plants,” and the new Jesus was in a similar situation. OK, got it.
Why?
And, more importantly, what did the killings have to do with anything?
Lack of an explanation for the first I can accept. No explanation for the latter just leaves us with an entirely pointless sequence of events pressed together hard enough to make a movie getting off on being heretical.
The strongest point of the flick was the character examination of the cop, until he went all “grey” on us.
Overall, probably not worth most people’s time, although it is well acted and a surprising plot twist, the piss-off-the-religious is pulled off rather clumsily.
-
“Fire goes out at 14% O2. You go out at 16%. This presents a problem.” “At least it happens in that order. That way you die with the lights on.”
2003-03-10 12:26:50
The above stupefying amusing statement was passed along to me via another friend during a gaming session. Here, you see, is the essence of humor. Viewing a situation from a slightly different angle. : )
So, I’ve no idea how long this missive will be. I’m gonna skip the major issues of the day, since I’ve been sick this whole last week with my seasonal head cold, and just woke up with an earache. As you might imagine, not the best state for complicated debates. I’m just hoping it goes away by 5:00 this afternoon, as I’m going to the Shakespeare Tavern tonight for dinner. (Ed: it did, I went, it was fun. More next time. Most of this was written Sun. Morning.) I don’t want to cancel, but I’ll be really rotten company if the pain in my ear flares up. I’ve just nudged past the “hey…I can’t hear outta this ear” stage and into the stage where you can count your pulse from the slight waves of discomfort as the flowing blood slightly compresses the space in the closed-off eustachian tube. As you can probably tell, I’ve had a lot of earaches in my time. Ruptured my left eardrum twice from earaches, and it’s permanently narrowed my eustachian tubes so they get inflamed and close off easily.
Been spending the time in between raucous nose-blowing playing Serious Sam through again. Damn this is a fun game. I’d beaten it before on the hardest setting, and discovered that it unlocked a still harder level, “Serious.” Beat it on that level, and it unlocked a STILL HARDER level, “Mental.” Said “the hell with this” and put the game away. Well, I just dug it outta the closet and beat the frickin’ game on “Mental.” For the three people out there who care, “Mental” is just like “Serious” except all of the enemies (except level bosses) fade in and out of visibility. Serious Sam is fun as all get out, but by the final levels you’re pretty “save happy” what with three hundred enemies charging out of bunkers, rockets flying around everywhere, and simultaneously trying to outrun a twenty-story boss monster.
I just beat the game on “Mental” on Friday.
Thankfully, it just said “you’ve mastered the game!” and didn’t unlock a harder level. I would’a flung the thing out the window if it had.
Farscape, with but three episodes left, is STILL GETTING COOLER! Harvey didn’t show up this episode, but Scorpius pulled off the difficult, often imitated, never duplicated, one man quadruple-cross, they reintroduced the death-obsessed crazy-man “Stark,” and Chrighton got to walk around the whole episode with a thermonuclear device strapped to his hip. (Council member: “He’s crazy!” Aryn Sun: “Yes, isn’t it fun?”) Even cooler, we got to see the Kaneesh (sp?) race engage in battle. When an alien race can redirect their own personal gravity and a fight breaks out, the first thing that happens is that six guys walk up the walls to better firing positions.
Cool…
Picked up a surprisingly good comic this last week. (Yes, yes, in addition to all the OTHER titles I’ve been following…gotta start cutting back.) I picked it up ‘cause it’s written by Alan Moore. I don’t follow many comic authors religiously, but Alan is the writer for the ENTIRE LINE (last time I checked) of the ABC (America’s Best Comics), nearly all of which are excellent, and the other projects of his I’ve picked up never disappointed. (Except maybe for “The Birth Caul”…a bit too inward-turning for my tastes.) The comic is a two-parter (both of which went on sale simultaneously…huh.) called “The Courtyard.” Cover art for the first is rather uninspired, but I recognized the hint of influence in the art for the second. Influence of what?
Why, HPL, of course.
Alan Moore has written a Lovecraft story.
This isn’t unusual. A lot of writers have found inspiration in the works of the old Rhode Island gentleman. A surprisingly large amount of what most people take to be Cthuloid “cannon” wasn’t even remotely written by HPL, much of it written long after his death by imitators and friends. It’s almost like an ancient altar that all horror writers must stand and worship at once or twice in their careers. It speaks strongly to the enduring nature of HPL’s writing, and the deep core of terror that he managed to touch despite the overly-florid nature of his language and near-laughable immensity of danger in which he placed his characters. (Hey, I love the guy’s works, but every great work has faults.) HPL would have been horrified at the amount of derivative work piled on the foundations he built, though. Not because he held his own work as sacred or inviolate, though, but because he never considered his own work to be very good. In letters to fans and friends he would constantly advise against building any stories around his own works, saying that the only inspiration he hoped to bestow on any writer would be encouragement to write their own stories around their own concepts and ideas, not work from his own feeble attempts. (I really need to index those letters collections so I can come up with appropriate quotes when necessary.)
It is rather unusual for comic book writers to do entire homage stories to HPL, though. Yeah, they’ll reprint his stories in comic-book form, but those who have “made it” to their own recognition don’t usually risk subverting their own styles in an homage to the old master, likely due to the higher expense of publishing a short story in comic-book form than in simple text. The only full homage I can think of off the bat would be Niel Gamian’s “It’s Only the End of the World Again” which, IIRC, was published across three issues of “Oni Press Presents” and later collected and colored into a graphic novel. (It was originally a text story published elsewhere.) This little comic reminds me of Gamian’s attempt quite a bit, but is actually a bit more skillfully executed than Niel’s. “World” was only a half-homage, introducing a werewolf into the town of Innsmouth on the night of a key sacrifice. It leaned more heavily on Gamian’s style than HPL’s, moving in a kind of dream-logic universe where everyone around the main character will turn and, apropos of nothing, address him with some tidbit of antique Lycanthrope lore as he drifts silently through the town. It worked to great effect and was an excellent story (if you don’t mind dream-logic) but as an homage only seemed to get about half the idea executed properly.
If “The Courtyard” has a fault, it’s in that it’s trying TOO hard to point out that it’s an homage, as he signposts it at about twenty different places. Gets almost laughable at points. I think I caught it at the first signpost, where Moore takes a page from Dave Barry’s book (ANY frickin’ page) and decides that “The Ulthar Cats” would make an excellent name for a rock band.
The story is about an FBI agent assigned to investigate a series of fifteen identical murders. Dismemberment, vivisection, beheading. The problem is that they’ve got confessions from three different individuals, who all admit to a couple of the murders, but who have no connection with one another. The killings are too elaborate to be coincidence, so what’s the connection? The agent pieces together a few obscure clues and ends up checking out club Zothique where he hears first the pale imitators “The Yellow Sign,” (*snerk*) and then the garbled phonetics of the night’s headliner, “The Ulthar Cats” lead up by the lead singer “Randolph Carter” before he makes contact with his target, a drug dealer wearing a yellow veil.
See what I mean about the signposts?
As I’ve learned to expect from Moore, he skillfully works in his own magical ideas to the Lovcraftian setting. The ending, wherein we discover the true nature of “Aklo,” the drug the man in the yellow veil is supplying, is both a surprise and seems totally natural. It’s really rather clever, especially in light of the shortness of the story. Alan Moore’s take on the mythos isn’t entirely unique, but he pulls it off with enough style and art it makes you believe he’s worked a bit of his own “magic” into it. (Alan Moore went a little weird a while back…even for a comic-book writer. He claims to have become a full-fledged modern magician, in the pagan sense, not the slight-of-hand. I could comment on it rather extensively, but I’d be talking outta my ass, as I’ve been unable to determine whether he legitimately believes it, it’s an elaborate show to befuddle the plebes, it’s an artistic affectation, or some combination of the three. His knowledge and background in such matters (see his research into Masonic thought as presented in the comic version of “From Hell”) is so much more extensive than mine that I’ve been unable to spot any “tells” left in his work and I don’t follow his website or personal-public missives extensively enough to figure him out.)
So, any HPL fans out there who’ve got about $7 to drop on two comics, I highly recommend this work. Not as much text, and tending towards the big-panel fault of most modern comics (bigger panels, less story over more pages), but clever and well told.
Whoop. That wasn’t supposed to be a review. Well, on to the review proper.
I’m going to try to keep these short. Jimmy’s recent deluge of the 10-crappy-horror-flick box set will keep me snowed under for too long otherwise.
The first of the two movies I’ve seen from this set is “Kill, Baby…Kill.” Please note the use of ellipsis. This differentiates it from “Kill, Baby, Kill” which was how I read the title at first. Naturally, this makes all the difference in the world, as the latter sounds like an early-50’s sexploitation flick along the lines of “Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill” (parodied by the Ranma OAV “Faster Kasumi, Kill, Kill”), whereas the former…well, OK, it sounds like an early 70’s sexploitation flick, the major difference being the use of color. Fortunately for everyone involved, this film turned out to be exactly NOT what one would expect from the title. What it actually is, is a surprisingly talented and original little 1966 Italian mood piece set in some backwoods Eastern European town. (Somewhere near Transylvania, to judge by the mood lighting.) The story was intriguing, and, for once, actually rather surprising in it’s structure and revelation. I really didn’t know what was causing the deaths and why it was happening, there was some interesting surrealism inserted, and the dub (originally in Italian) wasn’t all that bad (although noticeable).
A note or two on the technical aspects of the print. Near the start off the flick with the title sequence playing over a pair of men hauling a coffin off to the graveyard. I noticed at this point that the original print was pretty badly scratched and pitted, but the worst of it left ten minutes into the film. Looking closely at the film also nails it down pretty solidly to the early 1960’s as the color of the film is just slightly oversaturated, and much much brighter than you’d expect out of a spooky film. Just prior to the title sequence, there’s a stinger of a woman fleeing through a graveyard, and then, in terror, throwing herself from a window onto a spiked railing. When she ran through the graveyard she disappeared entirely into the darkness, so it may be a technical foible with the brightness levels. Either it’s oversaturated, or it’s invisible.
So, we follow the wandering coffin as they trail out of town, and pass a young doctor being brought in by horse and carriage. His driver refuses to come any closer to the town, and the doctor totes his medical bag into the crumbling stonework of the village. After the usual cold shoulder with your standard “silent, ominous, don’t-like-no-outsiders” villagers at the inn, the Doctor finds his way to the Burgermeister, Lex Luthor (as played by Yule Brenner).
No. Not really. (Luciano Catenacci)
There we learn that the visiting doctor is “Inspector Kruger” an outside expert brought in to investigate the girl so heedlessly killed so we could have an interesting title sequence. He sets out to autopsy the girl (the gentlemen to run off with her coffin so quickly had other ideas, and they have to haul her out of the ground) and is provided with a love interest…I mean witness…for the procedure. Here’s where things got interesting. In the woman’s heart (all cutting is done just below the camera angle) he finds a silver coin. This was a new one on me, but he’s informed by his witness that this was a house-magic ritual to put the dead to rest and and prevent the dead from becoming a vengeful ghost. Frankly, considering the dilapidated warehouse he’s provided to do the autopsy in, I’m surprised he didn’t find a bunch of spiders too.
Soon we learn that the woman’s death is blamed by the villagers on a curse, of which many others have died already, although no one will speak of it directly. However, we’re given a hint or two in the background as we hear the giggling of a girl. In another scene we see the legs of a young girl on a swing sweep by in the mist, and then cleverly transition back to the corpse-sheet. (OK, through the cloud of dry ice. Much of the film feels very stage-like in this respect.)
The Doctor finds out quickly that the village doesn’t appreciate his efforts, and regard his autopsy as a blasphemous act. He gets roughed up a bit on the way back to the inn by villagers angered at the loss of their quaint custom of disrespecting authority.
A few stories start acting in parallel at this point. The daughter of the tavern-keeper spots, and is spotted by, a strange apparition of a blond young girl (8-10) at the window of the inn. (For a while, I kept getting the tavern girl and “the witness” mixed up since they both have copper-red hair.) Terrified, the tavern-keeper calls on the help of the village witch to drive off the implied curse, which she does either through a hex or a mild bout of S&M. She’s subject to every manner of anti-hex as the movie progresses (what the hell is a “leech bind”? Is that barbed wire?) but it’s all for naught, and by the end of the film she is eventually compelled by the creepy little kid to pith herself on the edge of a candelabra.
The doctor, meanwhile, intercepts the witch and questions her. It turns out that the witch was the one to put the coin in the girl’s heart, and she has some information on the curse as well. (She’s also in bed with the Burgermeister…but that goes into some plot twists to elaborate to cover.) In his investigations, he discovers that it originates in the manor-house of the “Graps” family (what language is that?), of which there is only one surviving matron.
Spooky stuff happens during the doctor’s visit. He pursues a mystery child throughout the house. The belltower rings by itself. The “witness/love interest” has psychedelic nightmares about the little girl.
Spoiler Time! (Skip to the next review if you actually want to watch this fun little film.)
The old woman’s daughter, it turns out, died horribly through an accident, and it is her shade that curses this town. During a festival the girl lost her ball and was accidentally trampled by drunken revelers on horseback. She stumbled to the nearby belltower, but hadn’t the remaining strength to ring the bell, and bled to death there. Since then, she’s been coming back to the village to wreak vengeance on those who were too deep in their own revelry to help her.
Or is she?
The girl is basically the ubiquitous Japanese ghost of “a little girl with a ball” giggling away or staring intently, but never seeming to be exactly malevolent, just spooky as hell. (Only natural for a family that would have their daughter’s portrait painted next to an enormous SKULL! Jeez, woman.)
In the end, it’s discovered that it’s not the ghost’s hatred driving the curse, but the old matron’s vindictive desire to revenge her daughter’s death. The old woman drives her spectral daughter to bring about each death. This continues until she kills the beloved of the town witch. The witch and she face off in a final fight of strangling and stabbing. The girl’s ghost finaly rests. As it should, considering all the bodies piling up at the end.
All in all, a surprisingly good flick. It’s real quality lies in knowing how to add the little things, the bits and pieces of horror cliché, and use them without making them feel like clichés. The girl’s ball bouncing down the stairs of the spooky old mansion. The grasp of a tiny hand in a dark hallway. Hell, just being in an unexpected spot is pulled off really well. The artsy stuff was a bit over-the-top, though. At one point, the doctor is horrified to discover that he’s trapped in an infinite loop of the same set! There’s a budget-rate dream sequence with porcelain dolls. The camera-man tries for a low-budget Hitchcock effect and zooms up and down the center of a spiral staircase. Cobwebs are everywhere. Finally, that’s got to be one of the best lit tombs I’ve ever seen. Other than these nitpicks, though, a solidly worthy film. Pick it up if you encounter it.
Hokay…that’s one. Three pages. Gahhh. Must go shorter…
The second film is another Italian conversion horror flick, “Devil’s Nightmare.” So I take out the DVD, flip it over (Kill Baby…Kill is on the other side) stick it in, and
WHOA.
HOT LESBIAN SEX! What the hell?
Oh, wait. My mistake. Hot Lesbian VAMPIRE sex. What’s going on here? This looks too recent too…OHHHH….that’s the production company’s intro segment? THEIR INTRO SEGMENT? Then what’s this now? An intro to the intro? No wait…it’s too long.
Ah. It’s the intro to a host segment. Lucky us. The production company decided that one way to up the appeal of this particular flick was to give us a modernized-Elvira hostess porn star. Modernized how? Full-blown Vampire erotica. Our hostess, whoever she is, has the full-blown leather corset/bustier/gloves/hood outfit, feather headdress, two inch nails, fangs, enormous black-feathered wings, Marylin-Manson contacts (the kind that shrink your pupil to a point), spiked collar, and an earnest desire that she looked at least five years younger. She’s surrounded by minions more scantily and cheaply clothed, all running around topless in the manner that only women who have been instructed to “play with the raw meat seductively” can. You know, there’s a particular manner of acting that can only be seen when a porn actress is given a ludicrous stage direction. That sort of disinterested, ineffectual fumbling that tells you the script read “Julia walks to the bed and does sexy stuff,” when there’s nothing actually there for her to interact with. You can always tell when a porn house makes horror flicks, because there’s a LOT of these kind of directions. Well, we get a bunch of that before the movie even starts. See, our hostess gives us a tutorial. On cannibal flicks. Which might have had some relevance, if this was a cannibal flick. Which it isn’t. It’s just a random history lesson with a few stills from “Cannibal Holocaust,” while two extras from the host segment (Uh…one of whom our host clumsily clubbed a moment ago. Whasa matter dalink? Those nails and restrictive clothing screw with your batting average?) fumble around with a few pieces of raw meat in front of a bluescreen. (The meat never actually gets near anyone’s mouth. I’m willing to bet they aren’t paying enough for that. Oh, the irony.)
This host is lame. I appreciate the history lesson (even if I already knew nearly all of it), but she’s sort of a cross between Elvira and “The Creep,” a horror-host back in Indiana who managed to pad out “King Kong vs. Godzilla” into a three and a half hour film because he wouldn’t SHUT UP. She swore she’d be “back later,” but thankfully left for good. I can’t help but laugh at a horror host who worries that we might be “disorien-tated” and when the title text tells us that the upcoming “sleaze epic” is horror at it’s “campest best”. Geez. At least run the cards through a spellchecker, guys!
Start the ACTUAL movie, a 1971 piece still bearing the original Italian titles (“La Terrificante Notte Del Demonio”) despite its English dub. We start off with the allied bombing of Germany. Huh. We then join a German Kommandant in Berlin as he waits for the birth of his child in an extremely staged posture. When he finds out that the child is a girl, he dismisses everyone from the room, christens the child (nice touch…un-christened children’s souls went to limbo instead of heaven) and then STABS IT TO DEATH.
Well.
Then it’s 1971, the world has come out of it’s sepia tone into full color, and there’s a reporter interviewing the ex-Nazi about his family curse. He, however doesn’t like his family’s history being bantered about in the tabloids, and refuses her request to even photograph the family castle. She sneaks out and takes some pictures anyway, then heads back to her car, where she is confronted by something so horrible that it would have blown the whole budget to show it to the audience! Her car’s tires are punctured by a thrown pitchfork (THAT’s why the devil carries a pitchfork! To disable motorists! This explains everything!) and she’s run to ground.
This is never explained. At all.
Now for the fun bit. We encounter our heroes, a group of tourists on a bus tour of the countryside. Get this.
They’re the Italian Scooby Gang.
Well, they would be if Fred got married and brought his shrew of a wife along. And Scooby was turned into an incompetent German tour guide. And Shaggy found Jesus and became a minister. And old man Crenshaw came along for the ride.
OK, so maybe they’re not very good matches for the Scooby Gang. I’m gonna refer to them as such anyway because, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to remember their character’s real names, and this’ll be much funnier.
So, once again, the Mystery Machine has gotten lost, and everyone in the bus is passing the time by staring intently at Scooby’s bald spot. You want to look away, but you just can’t. Fortunately for them, there’s a helpful GHASTLY THIN CREEPY MAN standing by a bazing pile of underbrush with directions to a place they can spend the night. Naturally, it’s the creepy old castle we just saw. It’s just getting dark when they pull up in front of the old castle. Scooby drops the gang off to go park the car. Daphne, however is immediately beset. The front door opens by itself! And a piece of the façade nearly falls on her! And there’s a frog!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Fortunately, Fred’s there to reassure everyone, much to the consternation of his wife.
After wandering through the spooky old mansion/castle, they finally encounter the spooky butler and cook (sounding like Scooby-Doo yet?) and are taken to the cursed guest rooms. I kid you not, every guest room is cursed. You’d think they’d stop putting people in them. “In 1875, Erica von Rohenberg was here when she plunged a knife into the priest who was exorcising her…1436 ‘twas here that Princes von Art had her throat cut while sleeping…just last week this room ate Baron von Heidelberg…” (OK, I made that last one up.) Everyone’s sticking to type being unnerved by their rooms, although old man Crenshaw is the only one to really complain. They’re given some time before dinner, and make themselves at home in their rooms. We get a shot of Scooby unpacking a case of sausages to chew on. Fred and his wife unpack their things. Daphne and Velma, who share a room, take the opportunity to strip down to their lingerie and lounge around in seductive poses while filing their nails. Eventually they get bored and have hot lesbian sex.
You think I’m kidding.
You know, when Jimmy lent me this flick, he told me to watch out for the pointless lesbian sex scene. I didn’t think I was gonna have to ask him which one he meant, this one or the one in the opening. Hell, despite camera angle not going below the waist, the two of them christen both the bedroom and the bathtub in, by far, the longest scenes of the film. It really is entirely pointless, though. Hell, Daphne goes chasing off after Fred later that night. You know what they say about redheads.
The ex-Nazi, meanwhile, has been down in his alchemical laboratory, playing with sparklers and missing all the action. (The film gets a few points for actually getting alchemy right, the concept that it’s not really about turning base metals into gold, but exploration of higher philosophical principles. This is mentioned in a very boring speech later.)
Everyone gathers in the sitting room waiting for the Daphne and Velma to finish up before dinner. Crenshaw complains. Scooby drinks heavily. Ex-nazi tells about his time in the war, and eventually a horribly frightening woman cooks a dinner for them. Finally, we get the details of the family curse over dinner. Some ancestor sold his soul to the devil, and now every female child of the line is damned to serve the devil as a Succubus. (You know, like Morrigan?) Everyone at the table immediately begins to conjugate it incorrectly (It’s Succubi, damn it!) and get down the details of how Succubi are demonesses who tempt pious men into sin. Meanwhile, a mystery woman shows up at the front door. It’s our star, Erica Blanc, so she must be the Succubus. The flaming red hair and figure don’t hurt her chances either. The night gets darker. (Uh…guys? The sun’s right there. Did someone forget the “night” blue filter for the lens?) Erica comes to the table dressed in…well…some random strips of lycra stretched and tied around her. Everyone at the table spends the rest of the meal staring down her cleavage.
After dinner Shaggy and old man Crenshaw play chess under Erica’s watchful eye until the audience is extremely bored. Fred and Daphne arrange for a late-night rendezvous for old time’s sake, and everyone “goes to bed.” A scream from Velma (apparently she’s into role-reversal) brings everyone running to find red paint dripping through the celing. They discover an injured cat dipped in red paint on the floor above, along with an iron maiden and a guillotine. They also find themselves locked in the building. (Scoobier and scoobier.)
Long story short, the Succubus plays to their weaknesses and lures them each to their doom, wherein they see her true face. (Which looks exactly like her normal face with bigger cheekbones and a flashlight shining up from underneath.) Scooby sneaks out to the kitchen where Erica has prepared and serves him and enormous feast, on which he eventually chokes. Fred’s shrewish wife stalks around the dungeon (AHHHH! BAT ON A STRING!) looking for the Nazi gold, and, when she finds a pile of it, is sucked under and suffocates. Daphne and Fred sneak up to the attic where Erica grabs Fred, shoves him in the guillotine, and cuts off his head. Daphne, ever true to form, accidentally backs into the Iron Maiden. See, in theory, each is being tempted by a cardinal sin. Gluttony (Scooby), Greed (Fred’s wife), sloth (Velma?) etc. If they die in the commission of a mortal sin, then they can’t pray for forgiveness, and die dammed to hell. Old man Crenshaw is committing the sin of being really crotchety, as he can hear the bedsprings from Fred and Daphne’s earlier meeting and, sour because no one’s got any sugar for him, goes out into the hall to complain about the noise. He chases down who he thinks is the offending party, and Erica shoves him out a window. I guess his sin is gravity. Velma gets bitten by a snake. Shaggy, after being tormented for hours by still images of Erica superimposed over his section of film, leaves to do some reading, while Erica keeps stopping by wearing less and less clothing. Eventually he catches on to the situation, burns her with a crucifix, (producing some of the weirdest acting ever) and flees to a chapel on the neighboring grounds. At this point we find out the true monster! The Devil himself comes to tempt Shaggy from the confines of the church…and the Devil is…the GHASTLY THIN CREEPY MAN from the very beginning! (And he’d have gotten away with it too….)
In the end, Shaggy exchanges his soul for those of his six friends, and everyone wakes up the following morning as though nothing happened. Shaggy dismisses it as a dream, but elects to stay behind when the ex-Nazi is injured during his usual fencing practice. Everyone else loads up into the Mystery Machine….but what they don’t know is that it’s been replaced by a combustible CLOWN bus that immediately drives off the nearest cliff and EXPLODES.
Whoo.
In the end, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities for MST3K ever. If anyone wants to get some friends together for an amateur MST night, you couldn’t go wrong with this…so long as they don’t mind some fairly heavy nudity in there. Erica, Daphne, and Velma aren’t at all hard on the eyes, so I sure as hell didn’t mind. (Unlike the host segment, which was just painful.) Other than that, this is a real piece of camp. Funny for all the wrong reasons, and featuring the best in 300-watt candles. Not bad, exactly, but very very trite
-
Happy Dance
2003-03-02 23:46:48
HARVY’S BACK!
DAMN DAMN DAMN! Literally the coolest thing that Farscape could have done and they drop it RIGHT IN OUR LAPS! Hoody Hooo!
*Happy dance* * Happy dance* *Happy dance*
If you don’t know who Harvy is….you are a truly unfortunate individual. I ain’t gonna explain it to you, because I’d have to tell the majority of the last three season’s plots for it to even make sense. I’ll only say this much. He’s named after the seven-foot invisible rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name. And it is a most appropriate name.
There’s only one thing missing from the series now for it to reach the greatest level of coolness ever achieved by a cable show….and he’s in the preview for next week…
How could Sci Fi DO this to us? I was all acclimated to this cancellation until I saw how unbelievably cool Farscape was getting once again. It’s arcing up in coolness exponentially as we approach the final premature death of the show. It’s gonna die at a cliffhanger…and the painful nature of that is just starting to drive me nuts.
On the other hand, Sci Fi was showing “Dagon” on TV yesterday, so if you liked my review, you might want to catch this the next time around, likely cut up beyond recognition, but better than nothing.
I was gonna use this opportunity to alienate the majority of my readers by speaking for unpopular (in amv.org forums anyway) viewpoints of a controversial nature wherein at least half of the readers will disagree violently and insist on telling me why in extended four-letter populated missives or snide sidelong running commentaries located just outside of my peripheral vision, but the truth of the matter is I haven’t the energy or drive toward the subjects just now. You’ll have to wait for my attempt at forging a reasonable dialogue out of my support for US-led war in Iraq or my positive outlook on the organized Christian religion to which I belong (or, more specifically, why there are so many damn angry atheists out there)…whoops, did I say those out loud? Guess the cat’s outta the bag.
Besides, I’ve pretty much just been nattering away for no good reason the last few missives in these pre-review sections. I’ve been rattling along just to fill space, especially on that last one. I need to remember that this is just a distraction and implement of writing practice, not an audience I have to keep occupied for 40 minutes. Quality, not quantity, and no latter to justify utter lack of the former. I also need to cut back on the needless chatter in the movie reviews. Moments and monuments about which no one else cares one bit, so I’ll just run through the list of interesting events and get into the review. Besides, I’ve cracked open a second Guinness, and I have it on good authority that, when not inebriated, I am a terribly dull man of letters, dry and humorless and failing to hold the attention. My demeanor and wit can only improve with the inevitable clownish lack of balance and inhibition of scholarly thought that comes with inebriation. In other news, I’ve discovered that by misquoting and entirely misrepresenting the statements of my friends, I inevitably get a surge of comments in my livejournal. Fancy that.
Speaking of making a fool of myself…I ran into a friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in quite a while. We work in the same building, but on different floors, so we rarely encounter one another. I hadn’t seen her in over six months so I asked after her during a poster session (graduate recruiting weekend here). Subsequent to the regular pleasantries, I asked after her husband of a year and a half, whom I also happened to be friends with and whom I hadn’t seen in even longer.
“Oh” she says “don’t you listen to the gossip? We’re getting a divorce, he’s been kicked out of school, and he doesn’t really know what he’s going to do with his life at this point.” “Oh” says I, “I think I’ll go over here for a while.” This makes three friends of mine that have gotten married and divorced in the last five years. Is everyone else encountering a similarly large proportion of failed marriages in friends? I don’t know what to make of it, frankly, although, to be honest, I could have predicted that they wouldn’t have lasted. Two couples were straight out of a scene from an Italian restaurant.
On the tragedy front, this has been a bad week for deaths. First it was my great Uncle that I told you about in the last missive. Then the grandfather of my boss passed away (family patriarch). Then Mr. Rogers. On Friday, my labmate tells me that her grandmother has had a stroke and isn’t expected to live out the week. Dang. My other labmate has a mother with pervasive leukemia who has been undergoing weekly transfusions to keep her system up and running. With this many immediate problems in the lab’s closed community, it makes me worry about her.
Darius (Darkseid) cheered me up recently with a tape he lent me of old lost treasures. What kind of lost treasures? Well, for the past five years or so I’ve been kind of idly hunting around for a series I have a very vauge memory of. I sort of remember catching a cartoon on cable at my granparent’s house when I was just a wee tot, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember anything about it. Just the name: “Blackstar”, which I used to run past the bootlegger tables at D*C just to frustrate them and me. Well, Darkseid, with his bottomless resources of weird connections, actually happened across an episode in an old third-gen Sat. morning compillation that’s been wandering around fandom for ten years. It was in there among a couple of old Bionic Six episodes (a series I missed out on entirely, as our local channels in Indiana didn’t get that one…better than I expected, really, although Dr. Scarab has to be the most pathetic excuse for a villian I’ve seen in a long time), and the other day I sat down and watched the first episode of Blackstar I’ve seen in seventeen years.
Now I know why no one else has ever hunted it down.
It SUCKS. Damn, but that’s some bad animation. Lieutenant Blackstar is an astronaut who passes through a space vortex and ends up in a far away time where he immediately looses his shirt, takes up a weird looking sword ( that looks like it would impale him if he tripped and fell on it) and takes on the job of defending people too utterly incompetent or badly animated to defend themselves. We’re talking Fat-Albert level animation and lower, supporting badly-perspectived sight gags and about twelve commercial breaks. The crappy music jumped around so much between scenes it was hilarious, and the story….well, the one episode on the tape involved everyone waiting for the key to unlock springtime, and the ice king trying to stop them. This involved an incredible amount of running around in circles and insistence on “waiting for the key” (droned out almost Oz-like by one of the seven bright pink dwarf sidekicks), at the end of which, they open the box. Thrill a minute, huh?
I actually remember why I was so interested in it though. I never saw the introductory episode, and, even as a kid, the situation struck me as so ludicrous I always wondered at the setup. That, and Warlock (Blackstar’s steed, a flying dragon) was really cool, animated about two levels higher than anyone else, and they had this kickass transition sequence that was about 3/10s of a second long and involved an explosion. That’s it.
In other news, Jimmy (Lord Rae) must hate me. Why? You all know the lack of progress I’ve made on mount DVD, right? How the towering stack of unwatched DVDs threatens to topple over, starting a chain reaction with the books piled on my nightstand and smother me in my sleep, right? So what does Jimmy do? Why he comes up to me at the last anime meeting, and hands me…a BOX SET. Of what? OF CRAPPY HORROR FLICKS. TEN OF ‘EM!! I watched exactly one of them thus far, during the regular crashing and realignment-of-sleep cycles that accompany my 28-hour days of experiments, and it was a frickin’ LOST TREASURE. Never heard of it before, and it actually managed to be intriguing, clever, and original. But we’ll come to that.
First I have to advise you on legal counsel. The devil’s advocate. The original blind justice. The man who soars where eagles dare. OK, I’m stretching this too far. Yeah, the original double-D man, Daredevil.
Wait, I’ve gotta talk about the trailers first.
“The Core” is the dumbest summer flick I’ve seen ads for in a long time. Man this film will be high budget crap. I’m saying worse than Armageddon. The spinning of the earth’s core protects the earth from cosmic radiation? Gimmie a break. But I couldn’t help getting a little excited about it, just ‘cause ‘a all the pretty CG effects they’re gonna pour on the actors. Eh. Hopefully I’ll have the wherewithal to resist.
X-Men 2, though, was the first time I’ve had any hope for the film. I loved the first one, and I was really looking forward to the second one, what with the promise of Sentinals, and all. I mean, fourty-foot tall pink, purple, and blue robots tromping around New York. X-Men fighting said fashion monstrosities. How could it get any better? Well, apparently they decided to drop the Sentinels story in light of 9/11. Damn. Looks like they’re just going for a rehash of the “world doesn’t understand us” schtick again, with Magneto and the government as principle enemies. Standard conspiracy-to-shut-down-the-school material again. Blah, said I. Already it’s in the toilet. Well, maybe not. The ad is cool as hell. Nightcrawler doesn’t look too bad. Colossus is pretty dang nifty, and the action sequences are really nice. I don’t like the prospect of Bobby being the main-issue-boy this time around, as I never found Iceman particularly interesting, and they had to dig around a bit for an opponent to go against Wolverine (Lady Deathstryke, one of the cyborg-mechanical constructs making up the Reavers group in the mid 80’s…although this time around she seems strangely unaugmented…appropriately enough, as her origin was tied into the death of Wolvie’s Japanese lover Mariko, IIRC.) but the whole shebang might still be salvageable. Who knows? We were taking bets for a while on what the storylines were going to be for the X-men sequels. I correctly nailed the Sentinels for #2, but no one can figure out #3. Neatest would be the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, or the Inferno cycle. Most realistic? Dunno. All the other major cool X-men villans require too much backstory. Apocalypse? Eh. Stryfe? God, I hope not. The Beyonder? BWAH HA HA. Mr. Sinister? Eh. (What story is there to tell?) Days of Future Past? Depressing as hell. Can’t be Genosha, they kinda did that for the first film, and look to be doing it now for the second (although greatly scaled back). Seriously, what else could you tie in that would have involved the whole team? Mojoverse?
Oooohhhh. Spiral. Dazzler. Psylocke. Longshot. 80’s hair-and-metal-band-themed universe. Heh. Maybe if they didn’t mind a comedy sneaking in there.
On to Daredevil.
There is one really good way to summarize this film. Daredevil isn’t Batman or Spider man. That fact pretty much controls every aspect of the film’s presentation and reception. Simply, everyone, even non-comic-fans, knows, roughly, the stories of Batman and Spider man. Sure, they may not know the exact details all lined up in a row, and they may be missing key parts, but they know about the rich faux-playboy and the high school geek who live dangerous double-lives fighting the good fight with crazy costumed villains. Since they know the story, they’re really just going to the theater to see this story in big, full, 3-color print on a movie screen, rolling out the special effects and action scenes to play out in living color the stories they already know, many of them by heart. This allows for a certain forgiving nature from the crowd, as they look out for favorite bits, and let occasional bits of corny dialogue or exasperatingly silly melodrama slip by without letting it damage the status of “the story.” Daredevil ain’t like this. Oh, he’s a full-fledged hero with his own book and all, but he never really approached the status of Spider man (six monthly titles to his name) or Batman (seven…at a guess). Hell, even within the Marvel universe, his home turf, Daredevil was the guy who always stayed home and watched the shop during the bigger, more insanely overpowered universal dangers. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t called in during the last attempt to take Thanos down a notch, I’m fairly certain he never squared off against Galactus, or got tied up in the Beyonder fiasco, or went up against the Adversary, or was part of the craptacular “Onslaught” debacle...hell, I’m not even certain when was the last time he teamed up with The Avengers, and they’ll cross over into ANYONE’S book. (Personally, I think they all just want to avoid staying within earshot of Hercules in a domestic setting.) He was more of a street-level fighter…Batman without all the crazies. I think. See, I never followed his book, so everything here is impressions from the few times I’d seen him elsewhere than his own title.
What does all that elaboration mean? Well, it means that when you address the audience and say “see…there’s this nerd, and he gets spider-superpowers when he’s bitten by a radioactive spider on a class fieldtrip…so he decides to become a superhero journalist…” they go “Cool! It’s Spider Man! I know that story!” But when you go “see…there’s this kid, and he gets blinded by radioactive waste that gives him radar sense…so he decides to become a superhero lawyer...” they go “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
So the lack of popularity means that the movie’s already got a strike against it. The second strike, unfortunately, is inherent in the subject matter. While Spider Man and Batman had colorful, crazy villains like the Joker and Green Goblin, Daredevil’s adversary was always Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of crime. Now, the Kingpin was always a really major villain in the Marvel universe. He’s sort of their Lex Luthor, the “man behind the power,” only he’s also capable of physically trading blows with Spider Man. The problem is, that he is neither crazy nor dumb…and, not being crazy or dumb, he’s going to plan around anything like a physical confrontation with someone like Daredevil. He existed as an adversary to Daredevil because he was always the invisible force behind the crime on the street level, and he was always trying to have Daredevil eliminated indirectly, through bounty hunters, framing, etc., but never being in a position where Daredevil could get at him physically or legally. (Although, to be honest, I don’t think Matt Murdock could take the Kingpin in a fair fight. The man was frickin’ HUGE, moved remarkably fast, and constantly surrounded by bodyguards.) Unless done just right, this means a vastly less interesting villain to hold our attention.
The third strike? This one really hurts. The Marvel formula was in full effect for the origin story of Matt Murdock…and to make matters worse, several elements match Batman’s story almost identically. Parental figures taken by violence, subsequent emotional scarring leads to a life of crime-fighting. Get powers from radioactive “accident” granting inhuman abilities. Study martial arts long and hard until their primary weapon is hand-to-hand combat expertise (nothing to be sneezed at…I’m told by a friend that the only time Daredevil and Spider Man went toe-to-toe, Daredevil won), swing through the city on nightly patrols in a costume designed to evoke fear from the “cowardly criminal class,” possesses hidden rooms full of equipment funded by his legitimate business, not super-resilient, but capable of just powering through an attack. Daredevil really is what you’d get if you crossed Spider man with Batman, meaning that the audience is gonna think half the story was stolen from somewhere else, or gonna regard the whole story as a sequence of clichés.
So how does the movie handle these three strikes? Not flawlessly, but much better than I expected it to. The first strike, popularity, has the most glaring effect on the movie. The writers, realizing that they’ll need to A) pull the audience in quickly and B) throw stuff at them until it’s time for the end so that everyone maintains that attention. So they abbreviated what was a fairly complicated plotline (for a comic-book movie) down to just over an hour and a half (100 min), and, in a introductory twist that I’ve seen too often to be impressed by anymore, they start off in the middle of the film, with our hero in full costume, bleeding his life out on a church steeple. “Oh” we go, “That is cool. I wish to know what led to this and also subscribe to your literature so that we might read more.”
The second strike is also handled well, through the introduction of a “mini-boss” standing between Daredevil and his primary adversary. The “mini-boss” is everything that filmmakers have learned is what the audience looks for in a comic-book villain…psychotic, bloodthirsty, egotistical and crazy. (They seem to be stuck in this mode…look at Catwoman and Penguin from BMII. They were never crazy in the comics…quite the opposite, really.) Bullseye, the bounty hunter after Daredevil, is another fairly big villain in the Marvel universe, although orders of magnitude less so than the Kingpin, and, I could be wrong, but I think he was just incredibly skilled, not crazy. Gun for hire until-a-better-offer-comes-along sorta guy.
The third there really was no way around. It is the story, and they were gonna have to plough through the similarities no matter how they treated it.
So we start off on the church steeple, with the wounded Daredevil making his way inside, where he’s tended to by the pastor, as his life “flashes before his eyes”, backing the plot up to the actual start to fill us in.
Matt Murdock was a kid in a down-and-out section of New York called “Hell’s Kitchen.” His mom is never mentioned, but his father is a washed up old boxer who’s had to resort to working as a strongman for the local mob boss. Matt’s something of a shrimp himself, and is subjected to the humiliation of being regularly bullied by the fat kid from The Sopranos. While taking a shortcut through the dockyards one day, Matt sees his father at “work” and then causes an accident that splashes radioactive (or, in an increasingly popular present-day-movie-conversion, biohazardous) liquid in his eyes, permanently blinding him. However, the magical concoction of organic matter grants him, instead of a raging staph infection, a sonar-like ability with his hearing that steps right up to the plate to replace his sight. This, to me, was something of a mistake in the re-writing of Daredevil’s origin. For one, it rather deflects the tragedy of the situation…since he’s never really struck blind. I never read the comics, like I said, but I seem to recall that Daredevil didn’t just “get” his sonar ability. He spent years learning to live without sight before developing the sonar sense under the tutelage of his sensai “Stick.” (Daredevil was a pretty martial-arts intensive comic…only a step or two down from “Master of Kung Fu” or “Iron Fist and Power Man.” Hell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were supposed to have been mutated by the same radioactive waste that blinded Matt, and their master “Splinter” is a blatant homage to “Stick.”) “Stick” is entirely removed from the story here, which was something of a disappointment, if only because I wanted to see how they’d interpret him for the film. Anyway, cowed by his son’s blinding, Matt’s dad goes back to boxing, and the two of them strive to overcome their own limitations, the father his age, and Matt by developing his “sonar sense,” stopping his god and creator Stan Lee from stepping in front of a bus, and whippin’ the hell outta that Sopranos kid. Unfortunately, as one would expect from messing around with Tony Soprano’s kid, Matt’s dad runs afoul of the mob again, and is beaten to death after refusing to throw a fight.
Jump forward a bunch of years. Matt’s now a fairly famous, but not very wealthy partner in a law firm, dedicated to bringing justice to the streets either through legal action by day, or vigilateism at night. In both cases, his sonar sense helps him to anticipate moves, follow bullets through the air, or act as his own lie detector when questioning witnesses. He’s always after the “Kingpin,” a godfather-like figure who’s clever and influential enough to control the day-to-day actions of organized (and less-organized) crooks without ever coming out into the open himself. No one knows who the Kingpin is, but Murdock is obsessed with tracking him down.
All this is played out through a rape prosecution Matt’s pursuing against someone many of us should recognize, Paul Ben-Victor, AKA Bobby Hobbes from “The Invisible Man” TV series.
Bobby…say it ain’t so….
(I looked through his imbd reference…this guy’s been EVERYWHERE. Tombstone, True Romance, Cool World…all over the map!)
When the prosecution falls through due to a high-powered attorney’s help, Murdock takes on his alternate guise to mete out some Vigilante justice. Finding him in a bar, Daredevil proceeds to tear the place apart in a very Batman-esque (only a lot more aerobic) fashion. This really was the coolest scene in the flick, taking on/out the entire bar one at a time, absorbing more than a few blows along the way. The sonar-sense is used to confusing but cool-looking effect throughout. After finishing up there, he tracks Bobby to a rail station, a fight ensues, and Bobby ends up cut in half under the wheels of a subway. No remorse from Matt. Hell, he stood there and watched when he could have helped the guy offa the rails. This was a great scene, as it helped put some distance between Daredevil and his component parts. Either spider or bat man would have pulled the guy out. Matt Murdock just watched.
He heads back to his eyrie, pops himself a handful of prescription painkillers for all the blows he took, and crashes in a steel-vault like bed half filled with water, presumably to block out the incessant noise of the world around him. (Sound actually travels better through water than through air…but a great deal of sonic resolution is lost passing through gaseous/liquid interfaces, so this does work.)
Then, in an aside the next morning, we get to meet the Kingpin. Kingpin would have been a nearly impossible character to do properly. Bald, no neck, with a girth of around 350 pounds, but all of it muscle, and a truly accomplished martial artist with monsterous strength. That said, they did the best they could with Michael Clarke Duncan, the enormous actor from “The Green Mile.” Yeah, he’s black, but frankly, that really doesn’t matter. He was still the physically closest actor to the character, and he does a great job with the role. He shrugs off the death of Quesada (Bobby) as something not worth his time. Instead, facing off against an old organized-crime adversary who’s trying to get “out” of the industry, he sends word to hire his top mercenary hitman, “Bullseye.”
As I said before, I don’t think this is a very accurate portrayal of Bullseye, what with the crazy and all, but I could be wrong. His backstory is just that he was a baseball pitcher (or so my sources tell me) who was incredibly accurate, capable of hitting any target with any projectile. Turned to crime ‘cause it paid better. In a remarkable bit of realism, Bullseye spends the next day (twenty minutes in movie-time) on a plane back from Ireland where he’s been doing his best impression of Robin Hood’s “split the arrow” trick without even trying. (The realism was the time it took him to get to town.) There’s a great scene involving him, an annoying old woman, and a peanut on the plane.
Meanwhile, Matt meets his designated love interest. I was dreading this.
I never liked Electra. She always seemed like an add-on to the Daredevil story, just ‘cause every superhero needed a girlfriend…lest…you know…people start talking. She was also pretty solidly embedded in the “martial arts master” mode... a super-ninja leftover from the 70’s fascination with Bruce Lee who, for some reason, dressed in a bright magenta silk outfit. (Think Psylocke.) Always seemed ultimately silly to me. Fortunately (for my sensibilities) she’s dead. (Daredevil #181, I think.) Unfortunately, she came back. There was a good deal of uproar on this, ‘cause her character died a Jean-Grey death…found the body all gutted and everything, but they still managed to resurrect her several years later. Bleh. (I’ve often commented that the problem with Marvel is that they never kill anyone permanently (the problem with DC is that the replacement shows up next week) but I’ve recently remembered a whole sequence of great thick books Marvel released in the late eighties called the “Marvel Universe Dead Edition” with an enormous list of characters that were DEAD dead, so I’ll stop commenting along those lines anymore.)
The Daredevil/Electra dynamic is forced, contrived, and silly. He stalks her as a complete stranger from his usual coffeehouse, and they get in a flirtatious fight on a playground. It just screams Hollywood crap. I suppose the actress does OK, but I always hated the character, so I couldn’t really tell. They don’t really supply her with much of a background, which is probably for the best. IIRC, she was an assassin of some sort. Here she’s just the unexplained-ly superlative martial-arts expert daughter of one of the Kingpin’s competitors…the one whose death Kingpin was arranging earlier. There’s a few days devoted to the romance between the two, a cool-looking but probably highly uncomfortable moment on the rooftops in the rain, and Electra manages to get Murdock to neglect his superhero duties to go have sex instead of rescuing a mugging victim. Again, showing some differences from his component parts. I’m not sure how it was in the comics, but the general impression I’ve gotten from the film is that Daredevil was a much more “human” figure, giving in more readily to “final solutions” for crooks, and occasionally lacking enough in dedication to be pulled away from his chosen duties. Maybe it’s just a result of absorbing more blows than deflecting them.
So, anyway, Bullseye shows his “go get-em” attitude by taking on the job literally the moment he hits town, tossing shruiken from the back of a speeding motorcycle at Electra and her father’s limo. Daredevil, naturally, gets in the way, and in the resulting fight Bullseye’s aim is thrown slightly off, which, of course, makes Daredevil his nemesis. (DD also gets a pretty neat Akira-kick off with the motorcycle.) During the fight, Bullseye gets ahold of Daredevil’s cane, and impales his original target with it. What follows is the ever-popular, often-repeated “costumed hero gets framed by the bad guy.” Electra thinks he did it, everyone else thinks he did it, etc. etc. etc.
Blah blah blah, city disappointed in hero…blah blah blah, beloved out to kill him…blah blah blah, Bullseye plans to track him down.
The rest of the movie is pretty much denoument for all this. Some cool fight scenes, and Bullseye is an entertaining villain throughout. Electra spears DD through the shoulder and tears his mask off, and then manages what NO OTHER COMIC BOOK CHARACTER has ever managed in a similar situation by instantly figuring everything out without having to be told “no…see…he was framed.” Electra then gets speared on her own sais by Bullseye, and DD stumbles off to the church where he ends up lapping the plot.
Bullseye follows him there, and discovers DD’s Venom-like weakness to church belltowers while clambering over the pipe organ mounted behind the pews. The way DD finally dispatches Bullseye is cool as hell. The police, you see, have surrounded the building and have places snipers on the roof. Daredevil hears the click of the sniper’s weapon a block away, and “gives” during a fight at just the right time to pull Bullseye’s hands into the path of the bullet. Nice. The passion stance Bullseye takes when pleading after the fact is a wonderful extension of the actor’s take on the character too (although the bullet would hardly have cauterized the wounds in his hands. There should have been blood everywhere).
Following this is the final showdown with Wilson Fisk. DD got the identity of the Kingpin out of Bullseye before flinging him out of the fourth-story stained glass window. Fisk, knowing he was coming, sent all the guards home. As he tells his second, “I grew up in the Bronx. You wouldn’t understand this.
Really, the characterization of the villains and DD is wonderfully played out here. The utter self-assurance of Fisk as he waits for DD to show up, and the confidence in his own superiority is nearly palpable. Yeah, he avoids fights when they wouldn’t serve his purpose, but he’s hardly helpless himself. Again, it would have been impossible to get an actor as physically imposing as the comic book character is supposed to be, but Clarke Duncan is as close as they could get. The man’s arms are as big around as support beams, and, with the help of a little fly-wiring, he throws DD around the office with little effort. Of course, in the end, this is DD’s movie, so Murdock eventually takes Fisk down with a few sharp cracks to the knees, (Really rather anticlimactic…I was expecting more from the final fight.), and then spares him to make some moralistic point about “not being the bad guy.” Ehhh. OK. Then, just in case you’d managed to forget Daredevil’s component parts, DD leaves a rose in the alley where his father died. Just like Batman.
All in all, it was a pretty good show. Admittedly, I went in with few expectations because everyone online had been panning it rather badly, but I still think it stood up on a couple of levels in spite of that. I haven’t said much about Ben Affleck as the main character. Mostly, that’s because I kept forgetting about him. Ben Affleck isn’t so much an actor as he is an acting void. A blank spot that moves around the screen that other characters react to. In this case, that actually works for him. The whole blindness feeds into his naturally neutrally-expressive face. He’s always wearing shades or the mask, concealing much of his so-called “expressive range,” and when we can actually see his eyes, the milky, cataract-ed, lenses are staring lazy-eye-ish in some random direction. So basically, the lack of actual acting really fed into the concept of Murdock as a stolid stoic, determined to silently bear any weight the world could pile upon him.
To be honest, I’ve never really held an opinion on Affleck until this film. I haven’t paid him any attention in the other films I’ve seen him in, and most of the vindictiveness you might hear in this review is there because EVERYONE in my lab hates him. After a while that just rubs off on ya. He really didn’t do that bad of a job in this flick, and his stoic demeanor played a nice compliment to Clarke Duncan, and a great contrast to Bullseye. It just worked, and that’s really all that matters.
The CG-ing wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe, although it was noticeable. (Especially at the very start, where they added a rat for no apparent reason.) The fights were fairly well choreographed, kept interesting and varied enough for even this jaded hop-saki-weary viewer. (One point. Daredevil dodges a flurry of thrown glass from Bullseye by doing a series of backflips. Think about it. How does that dodge anything? Flipping forward could jump over a projectile. Doesn’t flipping backwards just give it two chances to hit you? You’d get the same effect by just ducking.) The only thing that really annoyed me was the way that everyone just sort of held still in the middle of a fight to listen to their opponent’s oratories. Electra was the only one to defy that trend, and I guess they killed her for it.
In conclusion, an A- to B+ for a comic book movie, B+ to B- overall. Personally, I thought it was a lot less cheesy than Spider Man, but that’s just me.
Again, I was gonna give my adoring fans a second review, exploring the first movie out of that BOX SET (*sob*) “Kill Baby, Kill” but I’m a bit too tired. I’ll probably be hitting y’all later with mini-reviews just to try and burn through the backlog. It’s a pity, since “Kill Baby Kill” was exactly the sort of film you didn’t expect from a title like that. Ah well.
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“Well….FUCK YOU MR. BEAR! YOU SPEAK LIES! LIIIEEEESSSSS!”
2003-02-23 01:11:08
Hee. Managed to manipulate the gimp into making me a fairly nice avatar. Nicer, anyway. A friend on Monday said that the reason he hasn’t linked me was that he could never remember “ersatzinsomnia” long enough to enter it into the “add friends” list. (On the other hand, he told me that I wrote too damn much, so nyahhhh to him anyway. ) This was followed by a flurry of questions from the peanut gallery wanting to know what the hell it meant anyway. This avatar, for those in the NNY know, should clear it up. Mostly it’s a retroactive explanation, though. Truth be told, I tried out my standard names in the available slot, and they were all either taken or too long. I picked this one out of desperation, not intending to let it settle on me as a moniker. After-the-fact, though, it’s not too bad, and is a pretty accurate description of me by the time I finish up any particular post.
I’ve filled up my three slots now, at least until I figure out how to delete a crappy one I accidentally uploaded. Am I missing something, or is it just hidden in a few layers?
As far as the gimp program goes, it seems pretty good, but I’m encountering a few weird problems. The big one is figuring out a few basic applications, like how to draw lines in a color other than black or white, how to get text to appear in a color I select as opposed to black, white, or a muddy approximation, and how to reselect some item (especially text!) deposited on the picture too far back down the undelete roster. The help file isn’t too much help, and I found myself closing without saving and reopening the source just to avoid reconstruction from accidentally accessing the text window again. Any instructional sites out there that would be of help?
On from the hopeless begging for instant competence in a technical field I’m only just getting my feet wet in….
This last weekend was a particularly crappy one. Got a call on Sat. morning from my folks. Wasn’t awake enough to go hunt down the telephone, so I let the machine get it. From the muffled noises in the other room I got “call me back.” When I did an hour or so later, my Dad told me that my great Uncle Teddy had died. It’s weird, but I’d had a premonition right before I called back that that might be the news. Of course, I’d also known that he’d been in the hospital shortly beforehand, so I think everyone was pretty much expecting it.
My great uncle, Dr. Theodore, was not the most colorful character in my family, but his wife, Kitty, was. They were the last of their generation on my father’s side of the family, and lived in the most singularly eccentric manner in a house out in Albuquerque. About every other year we’d trade off driving up to WI with driving out to Albuquerque to give each family equal time. I never knew my Dad’s parents, as both died before I was born (Grandmother of pancreatic cancer, Grandfather of heart problems…but apparently my Grandfather at least got to meet my mother from his hospital bed immediately after the wedding) so Kitty and Teddy were always sort of surrogate second-grandparents to me, although I don’t think I ever really thought of them as that. It’s hard to put it in plain terms, but with my mother’s family you can see where everyone sort of dovetails into one another. Mannerisms, personality, etc. Everyone in the area, even recent arrivals, recognize my mom as one of the “Hanson girls.” They were so profoundly, astonishingly different from my father, it’s hard to know where to start. The contrast with great Aunt Kitty was the most profound, so I’ll start there. You see, whereas my father is where I got my analytical side, from his engineering, circuit design, and constant tinkering with computers, some of my politics (he is a staunch conservative, though not a right-winger…my mother is on the opposite end of the scale), and a general packrat-of-knowledge nature, my great Aunt Kitty was just crazy.
No, really.
She was crazy in the “inspired artist” manner. Like the clichéd character who shows up in phenomenally bad sitcoms? I cannot express how accurate a description this was of Kitty. Imagine Pheobe from “Friends” at about 75 years old. The house was filled to overflowing with any number of projects and great works of art that were in various states of completion. There was a massive old tree trunk in the front yard that had been painted in a flower-child imitation of a totem pole. She had an alcove filled with a dozen platters of colored glass shards for leaded glass panels. A drawer full of oil paints variously dried out. Another alcove just for frames. Pounds of sculpting clay. Every available wall of the house was covered with her paintings, representing just about every artistic movement she lived through. There was an enormous abstract painting of great rolling color-forms framed in the living room. A full-length nude self-portrait (from when she was much younger) hanging in the guest room. (Yeah….) Aunt Kitty was a painter of some local repute, and had filled a gallery on rare occasions, but, by the time I was old enough to really keep track of these things, she struck me as so eclectic, with such a short attention span, that I don’t think she’d completed any projects in years.
But her paintings didn’t cover every wall. Oh no.
See, to get a real impression of the house you have to imagine stepping into the front hallway. There’s a small (6’x6’) section of linoleum laid down here. To your left is a secretary (desk/shelf combination) next to the entrance into Teddy’s old office. At a right angle to that is a hallway, the walls of which have been converted to bookshelves. Directly in front of you is a glass-fronted bookcase filled with medical texts. On top of that is a replica wooden Chinese boat with a broken prow fixed with brown electrical tape. Two jars holding dried-reedish arrangements bracket it. To one side of that is the main hallway entry into the living room. To your right, a hall table/chest of drawers with the phone.
Now look up.
Suspended from the ceiling, hanging in the corners and walls, interspaced between six different kinds of stringed instruments from around the world, are about fourteen Kachina dolls. Now, that’s not all that remarkable. Albuquerque lies about at the intersection of traditional Navaho and Pueblo Indian lands. (I think…as ABQ’s major draw is tourism, any and every neighboring Indian nation is welcome to gather there in businesses and contribute to museum exhibits. I’ve never really nailed down exactly who was from which direction.) The section of town referred to as “Old Towne” is lined with shops selling Indian items of varying degrees of quality and kitsch. American Indian silversmiths line the walkways with blankets full of jewelry and ornate combs glittering with cut turquoise (a soft stone most jewlers won’t handle since it fractures so easily). In among there you can find Kachina dolls from the $5-3”-paint-comes-off-on-your-hand type to the $15,000-2’-made-by-hand-by-a-master-of-the-craft type. They’re sort of the highest level of available “Indian art” that an aficionado could collect.
The remarkable thing about the Kachina hanging in my great Uncle’s front room, is that they’re authentic. Real, in other words. Defining that exactly would be a fumbling attempt on my part ( I know, I just tried) but these were all family Kachina given to my great Uncle by Hopi Indians. See, my uncle (who is not Hopi, he’s Greek, but only related to me by marriage) was trained as a plastic surgeon, and his practice ended up on a reservation. There, the “plastic” aspect of his training was limited to reconstructive work. Being a rather agricultural area, he had several stories of having to clean up the mangled remainders of hands caught in threshers, and similarly nasty afflictions. Apparently he was something of a miracle worker (as in “extremely skilled”) for the Indians on the reservation, and, over the years, several of them, even chiefs, gave him a family Kachina out of gratitude. Further, he has an Indian fetish hanging over/inside the front door. The fetish is a stone sculpture that is supposed to “suck in” any evil or unlucky spirits that attempt to enter the house. Again, this is one of those things you can buy in “southwestern-style” stores just about anywhere, (hell, we’ve got one over the door at home) but his was installed and blessed like forty years ago by a Hopi medicine man (I’m sorry if this isn’t the right term…but it’s close to the right idea) after Uncle Teddy saved his son’s life with an emergency operation. Unfortunately, it can only be moved after a ritualistic cleansing by another medicine man. Otherwise all of the dark spirits will be discharged into the first person to touch the fetish. With a fourty-year charge on the fetish, I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to poke it first. (Uncle Teddy and Aunt Kitty were well-remembered enough by the Pueblo community that they were able to get us in to see the religious dances…something I found out later isn’t the sort of thing the public is allowed in to see.)
The house is PACKED with stuff like this. Authentic stuff. See, because of some family investments, they could afford to travel, (he and Kitty owned a sizeable portion of…..wait for it……Fredrick’s of Hollywood…sold it off in the late seventies) and he and Kitty toured the world. Literally. There’s a framed, tattered old map hanging in one of the guest rooms (earlier it was their son Teo’s room) that details their travels. The thing has so many lines all over it, you can’t actually follow many of them. Little stickers run the border of the map detailing where and when the trips took place. At some point the entire border was covered, and they just gave up updating it. The two of them have been all over Africa, Europe, Indonesia, India, South America, some of Eastern Europe/Western Asia, and a bit in Australia, in many cases during times that wouldn’t really be characterized as “safe.” Kitty told me the story of when they toured China as one of the first few westerners let in after the Communists lightened up a little. Having been told not to wear anything that would attract too much attention to the group (it was a rather low-key tour) she responded by wearing a bright red silk suit, a zebra-skin jacket, and a monkey-skin hat. Apparently a crowd started following her around, convinced that the hat was made of human scalps.
The things they picked up on these tours are so numerous that I find it astonishing they were able to get them all home. We’re talking every available surface of the house is covered with things that look like they came out of an archaeological dig. Thing is, I can’t tell the difference between the touristy crap and the stuff of actual significance. I encountered a few things that I know for certain are one or the other, but most are a complete mystery. For instance, there’s an 11’ high solid ivory Buddah sitting on their television. Technically, it’s worthless. The moratorium on African ivory in the US means that they couldn’t even sell it if they wanted to. The only way ownership of ivory pieces (regardless of the fact that they received it as a gift long before the ban was put in place) can transfer now is through inheritance. Otherwise it simply can’t be gotten rid of. There’s an Iranian rug hanging on one wall depicting an enormous battle. There’s an authentic Polynesian medicine dragon (18” square sculpted softwood item designed to be set atop posts near a patient’s bed) high up on a cabinet that was sold off by the priest’s son without his knowledge. There’s an illuminated wooden panel from a Hungarian church. There’s cabinet full of ivory and jade knick-knacks and religious items. The floor was covered by oriental rugs constantly befouled by their two miserable old dogs. (I really think I developed my dislike of dogs from encounters with these. A toy poodle and one of those sharpie-mix dogs that were old enough to be arthritic, senile, rash-and-mange ridden, constantly forgetting their housetraining, and generally filthy and disgusting, but always wanting your attention. Man I hated those dogs.)
It sounds like I’m fixating on their “things” rather than themselves…and unfortunately that is rather true. As far back into my memory as I can go, they were both well beyond their “active” age. They always excluded themselves from any outings we went on, ‘cause neither could keep up with the kids. (Arthritis and general tiredness aside, Teddy really didn’t like traveling about.) My dad always got occupied with repairs to the house, my mom always spent her time talking to Kitty, and I got beleaguered by the dogs. Net result? Our visits to Albuquerque usually meant I got a lot of reading done. I hung out with my aunts in the area, or with Kitty and Teddy’s two adopted children when they were in town, but the vast majority of my visits to Albuquerque were spent in a state of boredom wandering the house looking at stuff. Outings went to Old Town, the museum, a local “War Room” gaming store, or spent at hideously awkward family reunions where I was the obvious odd man out. There is absolutely NOTHING to do in Alb. The boredom was palpable for me. The visits were essentially…I don’t want to say “an act of charity,” but the sole reason was to cheer up Kitty and Teddy, who didn’t get many visitors otherwise. Teddy, though, was something of an exception. As slow and old as he was physically, his mind was sharp as a tack. I’ve got a copy of his 500-page memoirs at home that I’ve never managed to leaf through (he dictated it to Kitty…and her writing style was rather annoying), but I must have heard most of it already first-hand. He could go on for hours about the people he’d known, the students he’d had, and the places he’d been, sitting there, a weathered, bent stick-figure of a classic old Grecian man, holding the bowl of his pipe contemplatively in one hand and holding his elbow with the other. (Both he and Kitty smoked like chimneys from their early twenties. Teddy was near ninety when he died. It was he who told me that “if you lived through any of the past five decades without knowing that smoking caused cancer, you are an idiot.” Took me a long time to figure out why he still smoked, knowing that. It was because he ENJOYED it. His life, his choice. It’s one of the main reasons I get so pissed off when people attack and deride smokers through laws and social stigma. His pipe I didn’t mind so much ‘cause I enjoyed the smell. Kitty’s cigarettes, though, were annoying as hell, ‘cause she ashed everywhere. She did the cooking, too. ‘Nuff said.)
I enjoyed Teddy’s stories immensely, although I could never take his advice. He warned me against being too shy with women, and advised what he had done to get over his shyness. Apparently he got just soused enough at a hotel-sponsored party in New York while attending medical school, announced to the crowd that he was gonna kiss every girl there, and proceeded to do so. He always seemed a diametric opposite to Kitty’s never-say-old flower-child attitude towards the world. He always seemed the aged patriarch of the family, insisting on serving the salad at dinner, etc., but his health was failing since I first was old enough to keep track. He was hard enough of hearing that it was physically painful to watch television with him, and frail enough that it looked like a fall would do him in. There were periods where he just didn’t feel like eating and had to be taken to the hospital to get some nourishment in him. We arrived for a visit one year to find him being wheeled out the front door by the paramedics. Much like George Burns, he always seemed on the brink of death, but never actually dieing. It was a major surprise when Aunt Kitty went first. She always did her morning exercises, was up and about before everyone else, and did her best to eat healthy, like a good child of the 60’s. In the end, though, her heart gave out as a consequence of her smoking. Spent less than three days in the hospital. Teddy was devastated, and his health has been spiraling downward since. I don’t know the exact cause, but he underwent surgery for a cranial bleed less than a week before.
What more can be said? The man was family, and I’ll miss him, but this was hardly unexpected. The weird thing is that when Kitty died, there was a big funeral and memorial service held in the art garden at the Alb art museum. It looks like Teddy isn’t even going to have a funeral. He’s being cremated and flown up to the family plot in NY. There might be a small memorial sometime in the summer, but that’s it. Kitty was the one for making a big production. Teddy never wanted any fuss.
So what else has been up with my life? Well, actually, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. This is a massive change for me. Used to be that the only thing I watched was Adult Swim. That’s still true, but now it’s on six nights a week. Specifically, I’ve been catching Futurama (11:00 Sun-Thurs) which I almost entirely missed in its pre-canceled state. The frickin’ thing was being shuttled around the schedule erratically in a test of its popularity to see if anyone cared about it, and it eventually got canceled. My previous impressions of it were good, but less than sterling. The characters seemed kinda facile to me, and the stories stupidly random. I also hated Zap Brannigan with a feverish intensity. Now that I’ve seen more than five or six episodes, though, I’m sorry I missed it the first time around. Wait, no, I’m not sorry, ‘cause this means I get in in a constant daily dose of new stuff. Damn hilarious stuff, far superior to the last few seasons of Simpsons. (As much as I’ve seen of them….) “And the presidential candidates are: Puny human number one, puny human number two, and Morbo’s good friend, Richard Nixon.” The only caveat is the constant celebrity shoving they do for no apparent reason. Trying to promote the show with the celebrity-voice and voice-impersonation the same way they did with Simpsons was a mistake, especially since it’d panned out years earlier when people stopped thinking it was remarkable after five seasons.
Also been keeping up with Buffy, which, IMHO, is still good, but is plainly running out of steam. I’m glad this is the last season, I think any others would just be stumbling through repetitive routines. It also hasn’t been really very funny for a long time, trading out the humor for the heavy angst so frequently I can hardly remember when the series was nothing but humor. I catch Angel when I remember it, but my lab-mate and I have a deal to keep one another up on the storylines. She follows Angel as religiously as I follow Buffy, so it works out well.
Of course, there’s the last handful of Farscape episodes (on now), but that’s too painful to talk about. (*snff*) I swear, these last few episodes have been the most incredibly cool ones since the very beginning. It hit a lull a while back, but it’s come roaring out now. And it’s gonna end in the middle of a storyline. *whine*
And finally, the item I was gonna post in the double review last time.
Reign, the Conqueror FUCKS WITH MY HEAD!
For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s basically an animated version of the story of Alexander the great.
Sort of.
Sort of?
Yeah, see, this project has a name attached to it that should be pretty well known in animation circles.
Peter Chung.
Heard of him?
Your loss.
Peter Chung is the creator of Aeon Flux, probably the second best animation to ever show up on MTV. (Behind only “The Maxx.”) And Aeon Flux was a thoroughly fucked up show.
Aeon was actually two shows. It’s always imperative you specify which one you’re talking about, or everyone ends up confused. The first was sort of a series of animated shorts starring a kind of stealthy super-agent in a ridiculous purple leather outfit on various missions of inscrutable significance. A kind of alien-technological world which she glided through with apparent ease and stealth. It was never clear who she was working for or against, what was going on, who were the good guys, or even if there were any. The five-to-eight minute shows had only a few constants (one show was about twenty minutes long, but was broken up into three segments for display on MTV). No one in the shows talked (there were grunts and groans, but no words), and at the end (once, in the beginning) Aeon dies gruesomely, usually due to some fabulously silly sequence of events. In the first film, she tumbles off the side of a building because a nail stuck in her bootheel from a loose electrical bracket five minutes earlier. In another, her anchor line tangles and loops around her neck when she isn’t paying attention. Once she dies because of a misplaced room-key number. Watching closely in one of the episodes, it’s hinted that Aeon was actually a sequence of clones or replicates all working as spies, while the original relaxed in a foot-fetish paradise, but that’s only conjecture based on a more surreal sequence in the animation. The show was…well…sick…on a couple of levels. Aeon always struck me as a hyperbolization of supermodel beauty to the point of grotesquerie. She’s built like a spider, with an insect-like movement, comically exaggerated and jerky, and a body winnowed down to an emaciated, knotted conglomeration of “LA-beauty” sinew and cartilage, wearing a kind of cross between a dom’s gear and a harness. Her opponents were dressed in light blue and dusky brown uniforms with weird clamshell helmets, and were apparently led by a blond-haired, thick-lipped politician who was scamming every side at once. The scenes and stories of the show occasionally got in a strange organic rot feel to them, that made the few sex(-ish) scenes seem…really damn disgusting and un-sexy. At one point, the blond leader squeezes a live green cockroach out of an incision in his finger. In another, Aeon exchanges a hidden message out a transport window via an extended “tonguing” session. A favorite episode ended with two minutes of Aeon spitting up blood after being shot through the neck.
This first show was originally snuck into MTV’s “Liquid Television,” possibly the greatest collection of weirdness in animation ever. The oddity of concept and brevity of execution fit LTV perfectly, and is probably the only thing still remembered widely about the show. (Although my personal favorite was “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions.”) LTV was sort of an invitational for all the animation no one else wanted, and Peter Chung’s pieces fit that to a T. For reasons I’ll never comprehend, Liquid television eventually went under (they’ve never run a complete release of the show on tape or DVD…just “best of” compillations…if anyone sees different, tell me.) and was replaced with cheapass imitators years later in the form of “Cartoon Sushi” (remembered only for …”Megacity 6060” I think) and “MTV’s Oddities” (for ongoing series like the excellent “Maxx” and crap-tacular “The Head.”)
The second show was entirely funded by MTV, wanting to expand upon the popularity of this weird little series. The second series, though, in the expansion to a half-hour format, lost the two guiding principles of the original, both understandably so. First, people talked. It’s a damn good thing they did. Even the original show was telling stories so weird that they barely managed to get the ideas across as it was. The new series increased the convoluted storytelling exponentially, and would have been impossible to do without some talking. Second, Aeon didn’t die at the end of every episode. Only a couple of them. I’m guessing that particular twist was getting a bit old for everyone involved, and would’ve been a stumbling block for the show.
That said, the show was pretty loyal to its origins, albeit intensely weirder. Peter Chung’s mind went a little wild on this, and the results were confusing, confounding, and usually really really sick. The blond individual was finally introduced as Trevor Goodchild, autocratic Machiavellian ruler of the nation of Breen. (His VA is especially good, managing a kind of nebulous “am I telling you everything?” attitude perfectly.) Aeon Flux, an agent from the rival and neighboring nation of Monica, is his obsession, as he simultaneously tries to capture and court her. The series inserted a surprising amount of weird-ass philosophy in there, as well as odd, deviant social commentary that was so convoluted and second-guessing it was positively nihilistic. An example. We start with some kids play-fighting in the street, while one kid in the background makes the “punch” noise by pounding a fist into his open hand. In the background, a pair of lovers are attempting to cross the wall dividing Monica from Breen, but the passage is guarded by automatic guns. (The “ptew” guns of Aeon Flux are practically his trademark.) The two make the attempt by memorizing the gun’s sequence and targeting protocol and performing elaborate gymnastics to avoid the fire. The man makes it through, but the woman is shot through the spine. Breen medicine replaces her shattered vertebra segment with a disposable vertebra, inserted into a slot in her back, and she is assigned menial work on an assembly line in a factory as punishment. Aeon, meanwhile, has been crossing the wall freely via her own route, and happens to live next door to the girl. The girl manages to spot her boyfriend through a hole in the wall, and tells him that she’s planning to make another attempt. He seems…less than enthusiastic, but is more than happy to show up and have sex through the wall. (Kinda, sorta, not shown.) She can accomplish this because, with the disposable vertebra ejected, she can turn COMPLETELY AROUND and BEND IN HALF at the waist. She pleads with Aeon to take her over the wall, but Aeon rebuffs her, and then romances (I use the word loosely) her boyfriend in her Monica apartment, in plain sight of the girl, trying to discourage her. Trevor Goodchild, in a ploy to “get to” Aeon, shows up in the girl’s apartment as her doctor and has an…intimate….moment with her while manipulating her spinal cord via the slot in her back. Trevor’s apparently trying to make Aeon jealous. Finally, the girl breaks away from Trevor’s manipulations and makes her second try at the wall. Her ability to bend completely in half lets her complete the course with ease…but the guns are turned off. She makes it to the door, only to be entrapped by a new device…a deviced she’d been assembling on that assembly line. A mechanized arm sedates her, and when she wakes up…she’s on the Breen side of the wall…and her legs are on the Monican side. As a closing stinger, we cut back to those kids from the beginning, who are now fighting for real. Why? We zoom in on the kid who was doing the sound effects before…and discover that his arms are gone.
Told you it was sick.
And that was an episode that was actually understandable! Others got positively surreal, with the birth of a three-eyed savior in one, a conspiracy to stick mechanical consciences into criminals, or the time Aeon got existentially drugged/sick and REALLY flipped out.
And this is the guy telling us about Alexander the great?
Whatever will we do?
Well, for one, we won’t take anything we’re told at face value.
But it’s proving to be really difficult.
The story? You already know as much as I do. Alexander the Great, mighty conquering king, tutored by Aristotle, conquered the known world (or as much of it as anyone would want to conquer) built a lot of citys, solved the Gordian knot, ruled until his death, at which point incompetent ruling by his sucessors led to the crumbling of the nation. Built the great library at Alexandrea.
See, that’s all I know of for certain. Yeah, we covered him in school, but not to any great depth, and my dislike of everything Greek (see last entry) disinclined me towards paying attention to those lessons. So I am woefully unprepared to judge this series on historical accuracy. Right from the first episode, I knew I was gonna be in trouble. The first episode covers Alexander’s pursuit and taming of Eucephalus (sp?) the man-eating horse. Now, as ludicrous as that sounds, I know of at least two other occasions of man-eating horses showing up in Greek legend (I think one of Hercules’s tasks involved taming a herd of them), and the name also happens to be the name of Baron Munchausen’s horse from the movie of the same name. But is there a legend about Alexander taming this wild, carnivorous beast?
Hell if I know.
I came up with a term for this a long time ago. I call it “Cthulhuoid literature,” not because it has anything to do with Cthulhu or Lovecraft, but because of something people have been doing with his works for decades. They’re effectively faking that it’s real. They mix in just enough truth with their invention that, unless you already know precisely what fact is being discussed, you can’t tell where the seam is between truth and fiction. (A great example is one text I read did a structural language comparison between the “Malleus Mafalcareum” and “De Vermiis Mysterious.” The first is a real book, Cotton Mather’s old witch-hunting manual. The second is entirely fictional. It’s clever stuff like this that still has some people convinced that the Necronomicon is real.
So they keep mixing in really weird must-be-untrue bits of legend into the few facts and all the rumors I half-remember…mixed together in one of Peter Chung’s fever dreams. Needless to say, I enjoy the hell out of it.
The world this takes place in isn’t really the ancient world, of course. It’s sort of an alien alternate-dimension of fabulous structures and elaborate machinery where they, nonetheless, still conduct their battles with sword and pike….and enormous computer-generated war chariots. It really is a second-cousin world to the aesthetics of Aeon Flux. Everyone is stretched-out in the El-Greco fashion of Chung’s style, slightly distorted in a funhouse mirror, and wearing ludicrous garments of metal and cloth. The story itself is twisted around enough to fit the sick leanings of Chung’s style as well. It seems that Alexander’s mother is a high priestess of a pagan (non-official-Gods) snake cult. According to her, Alexander was the result of a congress with Zeus in the form of a large, golden serpent, and from the way she…uh…performs ceremonies with two large anacondas, you wonder if she doesn’t just like snake a little too much. Further, the way she fondles her young son gives the distinct impression that Alexander has had something of an Oedipal complex thrust upon him. (Ouch. Bad choice of words.) Here’s the thing. The king, Alexander’s father, has Alexander’s mother banished for paganism, and remarries in order to have a different successor. Now I KNOW I read somewhere that Alexander’s father (Philip II, although I could have gotten that wrong) divorced Alexander’s mother in this fashion…and I think there was accusations of paganism in there…and that she was really crazy…but I’ve no idea how much of the rest applies! I’m utterly befuddled and loving it! Just to further make it difficult to show on US TV, it’s a widely disputed theory that Alexander was homosexual. There’s nothing unusual about that, especially in the ancient world, but remember this is CN we’re talking about. To those paying attention, it’s obvious as hell. Alexander is so fucking bishonen in this series he could DROP a fangirl. The fashion penchant that Chung has for bare chests and exceedingly short pants (carried over from AF) lends to this. Further, apart from the fact that he’s rarely ever out of the company of men, he has a…”manservant” that follows him around everywhere and plays him music on a lyre. If anything, his companion is more bishonen than he.
Then there’s the best part of all. Remember the weird philosophy from AF? Imagine the concept of the Platonic forms seen through Chung’s lens. What do we get?
We get Aristotle vs. the flying Pythagorean ninjas.
DAYMN.
And yet, again, I’m not sure how much they’re making up. Oh, yeah, the flying is right out, but wait. If I’m remembering correctly, philosophical and especially mathematical (considered a part of philosophy at the time) knowledge was treated nearly like magic in those ages. The scholars were regarded more as seers than teachers (this was especially true of the crazy-person-in-the-street philosopher, like Diogenes), and several schools of thought developed a near-masonic cult-like following, keeping their greatest discoveries secret, hording them away like secret magical knowledge. I’m almost certain that Pythagoras or his followers was one of the most profoundly cult-like in this respect, but it could just be the Cthulhuoid literature of this series tripping me up. See, Aristotle is supposed to have received something of great importance from his teacher Plato, before the latter’s death. A mysterious object called “the Platohedron,” (it’s hinted that this has something to do with Plato’s idea of “forms”… utterly pure objects of external existence epitomizing an ideal…like “the Good”…the “hedron” points to the purity of representation of these forms found in the world of mathematics and exact geometry) and Pythagoreas has sent his flying ninja emissaries to fetch it, as well as to clip the young Alexander’s wings before he becomes too powerful. Thus far, they’ve failed in every respect.
The story has actually been moving along at a remarkable pace. Alexander arranges the death of his father, and leads his armies on a continental storm of conquest and discovery. He solves the Gordian knot, meets with Diogenes, and faces off against Darius II in battle.
Then something inexplicable happened. They changed VAs. At least I think they did. Two episodes ago, they switched off the voices for several of the main characters, and pulled in what I swear are the second-stringer VAs for all bad anime. The stupid affected trill in a wanton girl, the clumsy pacing of the standard soldier’s talk. Even the noxiously odius mistranslation-ish wording…when I believe it was composed in ENGLISH! It’s most noticeable with Aristotle. I’m pretty sure his VA was Trevor Goodchild (doing an excellent job as always), when all of a sudden his voice drops an octave between episodes and his phrasing is all wrong. I didn’t realize how much TG’s VA did for this part until it was gone, and I was left with the vacuous idiot. Even worse is the Girl Alexander encountered in Babylon, who’s voice jumped UP an octave and became every generic anime love interest ever. Bleh. An the show shows no sign of switching back.
Despite that, it’s still pretty damn good. Last episode, Alexander stood on the future site of Alexandrea, and experienced a surreal flash-forward to the time when this city would house his tomb. Killa-cool.
That’s enough for this week. Next time, I’ll give you my impression of double-D’s. (No, not that, you perv.)
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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