>SUPERVERBOSE

Toy Stories

2009-11-07T07:32:11Z

The last chapter of The House At Pooh Corner begins, "Christopher Robin was going away." In it, the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood throw Christopher Robin a going-away party, and when it's over, he and Pooh find an enchanted place in the forest, a circle of trees where "they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky." The boy, who is going away to boarding school, discusses all the things he's learning, and the bear dimly tries to keep up. The boy, who loves to do Nothing, wistfully says that he won't be doing Nothing as much anymore. "They don't let you," he says. He asks Pooh never to forget him, and hopes that whatever happens, Pooh will understand. But Pooh, of course, doesn't understand what he's supposed to understand. It ends:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

I can't get through this chapter without crying. I can't even get through talking or writing about it without crying. The first (and only) time I read it out loud to Dante, I couldn't hold my voice steady, and as soon as it was over, I fled the room, into Laura's arms. It wasn't just tears welling up -- it was anguished, full-body sobs, a torrent of them. Lucky for me, Dante was awfully young, and I don't think he could tell what was going on.

Why this intense reaction? I never understood it all that well, though I always vaguely assumed it had something to do with grief and loss. Recently, though, I gained a bit more insight, courtesy of a visit to the movies: the double feature of Toy Story and Toy Story 2. The latter movie has a similar moment, only slightly less heart-piercing than the Pooh chapter. In it, Sarah McLachlan sings a song called "When She Loved Me," from the point of view of a toy who's been outgrown by her owner. I was ready for it, having seen the movie before, but as I watched it, I felt those same aches, that same weeping flood, barely held in check.

At the end of the second movie, I understood it all a little better. It is, largely, about loss, a few different flavors of it. On top of the stack is the loss of my own childhood. It's inevitable, of course, and many of the trade-offs that come with adulthood are fantastic, but for those of us whose childhoods were light on trauma, there's a purity and joy back there that feel irretrievable. Pooh's befuddlement goes hand in hand with his contentment, because the more sophistication creeps into our understanding of reality, the more compromised we are in our ability to hold the simple belief that everything is going to be okay. That's innocence, and it gets obliterated by experience. Even when things are great, there is much to do: obligations to fulfill, relationships to navigate, maintenance to perform. The mind's sky can never again be pure and cloudless in the way it once was.

Every toy in the Toy Story movies feels these clouds gathering. They live in fear of yard sales, or even simply being shelved. They don't want to be outgrown. Kids invest a great deal of their psyches into favorite toys, but kids don't stay kids. As the "When She Loved Me" montage so concisely shows, that psychic investment gets redirected into new things, until what once seemed so special sits neglected for years, or is discarded altogether. We're in a rush to grow up as it's happening, and it's only from the vantage of adulthood that sentimental feelings begin to form around what those childhood toys represented: simplicity, innocence, an un-self-conscious sense of fun and happiness. They don't let you do Nothing anymore. When adulthood is stressful and difficult, as it has been for me lately, those losses ache all the more.

A childhood toy is also a mirror held up to a kid's capacity for unrestrained, uncomplicated love. Woody loves Andy like no person could love another. Woody belongs to Andy, truly belongs. I remember that feeling, that a toy loved me. I didn't know then that it was my own ability to love, reflected back at me. The closest we ever get to that feeling again is with pets. Having just lost our cat of 14 years, I've been reflecting quite a bit on how much that feeling means to me. Of course, a living animal is far different from a toy, but the feelings they evoke are at least close cousins. One of the notes of grief that Milne's last chapter brings forth in me is about leaving that shade of love behind, the feeling of being loved by something that is yours completely, rather than belonging first to itself.

I don't mean to enshrine this emotional echo chamber as somehow superior to love in adult relationships -- the rewards of a richer, deeper, more complex attachment are enormous. However, those relationships are hard, much harder than anything ever gets for Pooh and Christopher Robin. For that reason, I don't think anything can ever be as special to him as Pooh is, or at least certainly not special in the same way. When Christopher Robin knights him, Sir Pooh de Bear, that's what he's acknowledging.

I relate these feelings back to my own childhood, but now that I'm a parent, I get to watch them play out right in front of me as well. I see Dante's reactions to loss, the total despair that seems to overwhelm him, even as he grasps at ideas for how the broken thing can be replaced, or how the lost thing can be memorialized. This was my first time watching the Toy Story movies as a parent, and they felt quite different to me. When Andy can't find Woody and Buzz in the first film, I got a wholly unexpected pang, because I thought immediately of Dante and how distraught he would be (and has become) in the event that he couldn't find his favorite companion bears, Benjamin and James.

There's another moment in the movie that hit me even harder. The family van stops at a gas station on the way to Pizza Planet; Buzz and Woody fall out. The van drives away, leaving them stranded, and Woody says, "Doesn't he realize that I'm not there?" And then, understanding what's happened, he drops to his knees in utter devastation, wailing, "I'm lost! Oh, I'm a lost toy!"

Watching this scene, I found myself genuinely upset, in a way that went far beyond sympathy for the character. The movie swept me along, so I didn't take the time to think about the feeling then, but afterwards, I was able to pinpoint exactly what I found so painfully poignant: the way Woody feels in that scene is exactly how I would feel if I lost Dante.

That's what's down at the bottom of these feelings. The deepest way these toy stories break my heart is that I am the toy. Sure, Pooh is a symbol for my own childhood, for innocent love, and so on, but most of all, he's a symbol for me, as I watch my child discard his former selves, over and over. I absolutely adored 2-year-old Dante, and I'll never, ever get another day with him. 3-year-old Dante is gone forever, and every day that passes is another goodbye to who he is now.

I have never been much of one to grasp at the fleeting preciousness of childhood like that. I am a firm believer in embracing the present and the future, and I've always found that the older Dante gets, the more I enjoy him. Still, I can't deny the powerful grief that surfaces when I think that one day, I won't ever get to feel his sweet, small arms wrapped around my neck. Like Woody with Andy, like Pooh with Christopher Robin, I belong to Dante in a way I never could with anyone else. Life with him is a hurricane, and I struggle all the time to stay balanced and functional. But at the center of the hurricane is an enchanted place, overflowing with moments of joy.

I know I can't stop him from growing up, and I don't want to. So when I feel the pain of a thousand tiny losses, I will cling to the belief that somewhere, in an enchanted place I keep safe in my mind, he and I will always be playing.

Young Liars

2009-09-29T04:36:54Z

Kristen Wiig plays a recurring character on Saturday Night Live named Judy Grimes, whose schtick is that she's a travel expert, but gets much too nervous on air to give any travel tips. Instead, she just keeps negating herself, making a statement and then saying, "just kidding." As the sketch winds up, she eventually dives into some rapid-fire, bravura, all-in-one-breath monologue along these lines:

I'm fine. Besides, I... can't come back another time because I'm too busy -- just kidding, I'm not busy -- just kidding, I am but I don't have any time for you -- just kidding, I don't know how to make time -- just kidding, but I know how to make pies -- just kidding, I don't -- just kidding, I do, and I'll make one right now -- just kidding, I can't, because I don't have a pan -- just kidding, I do, but I gotta buy sugar -- just kidding, I have what I need, but I don't have a stove -- just kidding, there's a stove under here, it's hot -- ouch! -- just kidding, there's no stove under here, there's one at my house, let's go there right now -- just kidding, we can't all go together, it's hard to travel in a group -- just kidding, we can't do it because my car's not big enough -- just kidding, we're in right now, this whole studio's my car -- just kidding, it isn't -- just kidding, it is -- beep, beep! Get out of my way! -- just kidding, we're not in my car -- just kidding, I wrecked my car -- just kidding, I ran into a tree -- just kidding, it was a bush -- just kidding, it was a man, he was very upset -- just kidding, he laughed -- just kidding, he died -- just kidding, it was a dream -- just kidding, it wasn't a dream, it was a movie I rented -- just kidding, I bought it, and now I regret it, it wasn't very good -- just kidding, it was okay -- just kidding!

This is exactly the narrative structure of David Lapham's Young Liars. Oh, it starts out coherent enough. There's a great premise -- a guy in love with a girl who has a bullet in her brain, which makes her utterly fearless, obedient but unpredictable, and constantly in danger of death. There's a bevy of fun supporting characters. There's a breathless, rock & roll aesthetic, which veers from extremes of violence to heartbreaking tenderness. There's a bunch of compelling, plotty twists and turns, intriguing flashbacks, and dark foreshadowing, with a killer climax at the end of issue #6.

Unfortunately, it then goes on for 12 more issues.

In those issues, Lapham breaks down everything he's built up over the first six to replace it with something else. And then he does it again. And again. And again. Oh, the next part of the story is Sadie's coma dream. Just kidding, it's real and she's an alien from Mars. Just kidding, a different character is the alien. Just kidding, the narrator is a schizophrenic. Just kidding, he's sane but he's being manipulated by a conspiracy. Just kidding, the conspiracy is the aliens. Just kidding, the aliens are taking over the conspiracy. Just kidding, the aliens are just a metaphor for corporate takeover. Just kidding, the narrator is a liar. Just kidding, everybody's a liar. Just kidding, this is all stories told by a psychotic washed-up rock star. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. The first time one of these shifts happens, it's intriguing. Then it's shocking and enthralling. Then it's confusing. Then irritating. Then maddening. Then really, really boring.

I read all 18 issues of Young Liars in one day. Stray Bullets made me a fan of Lapham, so I decided to subscribe to YL, but my time is highly circumscribed, so the series started and ended before I began reading it. What this experience crystallized for me is that I deeply dislike this narrative structure. Don't get me wrong -- I dig some reality-bending in a story. It's a great spice. What I do not dig is when the story's basic reality gets fractured so often or so severely that I no longer know what the story's basic reality even is anymore. If I go long enough with no idea what is real, it turns out I really no longer care what is real, and the whole thing gets much less interesting. Plus, I completely lose faith that interesting plot danglers from early on are going to be paid off in any coherent way.

I read a great dissection of Heroes, which very accurately described it as a narrative Ponzi scheme, constantly borrowing from the future to disguise the fact that it's actually based on nothing. This is Young Liars' problem as well. Between this, the disappointing run on Detective Comics, and the indefinite cessation of Stray Bullets (along with my vanished faith that that series will ever draw its strands together), I think I'm done with David Lapham now. He's a fantastic stylist, but it turns out I'm only impressed by that when it's paired with good storytelling.

Giving 110%

2009-09-09T04:55:19Z

This is something I sent out at work, and it got a good enough reception that I decided to post it here as well. We're in the midst of a massive project at CU, replacing the student system and a bunch of peripheral systems with Oracle PeopleSoft products. There is a lot of pressure, a lot of intensity... and a lot of status reporting. Some of that, especially as it travels up the chain, takes on a glossy, nonspecific quality. In talking about it with Laura, we were reminded of another place where that kind of status reporting happens...

My ESPN-loving spouse started this train rolling, and it became unstoppable. Now I just have to write it all down. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Project Status Report, consisting entirely of clichés from sports interviews. (With substitutions, where appropriate.)

It is what it is.
There were factors beyond my control.
We came to code, but I'm not gonna lie, it's been a tough match so far.
This time around, the software problems just wanted it more.
But I'm just gonna settle down, focus on doing my best. I can only control myself, you know what I mean? I'm gonna step up, and from this point forward, I'm just gonna focus on my game. I mean, work. That's what matters, sticking with my guys, doing my work. I'm gonna do everything I can to get this project to the Superbowl. I mean, completion.
I'm a team player. It's not about me, it's about the whole team. We have to pull together.
It's been tough out there, but we'll get our game back. It's still early in the project. We've got a lot of go-lives after this one, and we're just gonna take it one go-live at a time. We've still got a long timeline ahead of us. We're not circling any go-live on the calendar. Every go-live is important.
Replacing student systems is a professional business, you've gotta understand that. Stuff that happens out there, it's not personal.
It's easy to see the things that went wrong in this go-live, but there were things that went right. Anyway, this go-live is not over. We're gonna get back out there and give it our best, stay focused, and take it to the next level.
We're gonna get back into the office next week, practice the things we need to practice, take another look at the PeopleBooks, and keep working hard.
I'm only thinking about the next go-live on the schedule. It's not about momentum -- the project happens one go-live at a time.
I'm just glad to be here. I want to help the project any way I can.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 3 revisited

2009-08-10T05:09:21Z

Early in my Buffy-watching project, I swore off both DVD extras and Television Without Pity recaps, because they were just way too spoiler-laden. Now that I've finished watching all episodes of Buffy and Angel, I'm (slowly!) going back through the whole saga, reading the recaps and watching the extras.

I just finished season three of Buffy for the second time, and am amazed anew. What a marvelous achievement. It's just such great television, and this time through I found myself appreciating a couple of things that had passed me by the first time:

*** IF YOU'RE READING THIS ON FACEBOOK, BE ADVISED THAT THE SPOILERS BEGIN BELOW ***

1) I liked the Mayor the first time around, just because his milk-and-cookies qualities made such a great contrast to his evilness and batshit insanity. What I appreciated about him this time, though, was the fact that because he really didn't care about them, he was able to speak the absolute truth to Buffy and Angel. I loved the scene in Choices where he tongue-lashes Angel for selfishness in relation to Buffy. Everything he says is absolutely dead-on, and highlights the fact that even though they don't look it, Buffy and Angel are a ridiculously May-December relationship. There's a strong argument to be made that Angel is taking advantage of her -- whatever she's had to go through, she's still an 18-year-old (if that) girl. The mayor's genuine disgust with Angel in that scene is a fantastic way of completely dooming their relationship from an unexpected direction.

2) The resonance of the classroom scene in Earshot is just a thing of beauty. The Othello discussion serves the purpose of showing Buffy's sudden classroom smarts, and her peers' reaction to it, of course. The teacher's explication puts focus on Buffy's anxiety about Angel and leads us in to the attempted mind-reading scene, of course. But let's take a look at what Buffy actually says about Iago:

"Well, he, um, he sort of admits himself that his motive are... spurious! He, um, he does things because he, he enjoys them. It's like he's not, he's not really a person. He's a, the dark half of Othello himself."

The dark half of the protagonist? Doing evil for the joy of it, with spurious motives? Ring any bells about anybody from this season? Oh, right: Faith. Of course.

And listening to the DVD commentary from writer Jane Espenson reveals that this scene was heavily rewritten by Joss. Of course it was.

Etta James at the Boulder Theater, 6/13

2009-06-21T07:27:51Z

I became an Etta James fan in kind of a backwards way. Being quite the dedicated Eurythmics fan back in the 80's, I even paid attention to their quirky little side projects. One of these was the soundtrack for a 1989 movie called Rooftops, which I never saw but was apparently fairly awful. Dave Stewart did some songs for it, and one of these was a track called "Avenue D", on which Etta was the vocalist. I didn't really know who she was, aside from the fact that I recognized her name and knew she'd been around a while. I did read a little article saying something like, "Dave Stewart does his best work when paired with a soulful singer, and James certainly fills the bill." I was at NYU at the time -- I actually remember listening to the 45 at Tower Records, liking the song, and buying it. I really dug her performance on that song. I looked into her a little more (which in those pre-Internet days meant just paying attention to what records of hers were in the stores), and found that she had done a comeback album the previous year called Seven Year Itch. A friend and I split the cost of the cassette, and I really liked that too. I bought her next couple of records, then lost track of her for a while.

10 years or so later, I became conscious of "At Last", again in a backwards way -- Stevie did a cover of it at a benefit concert where everybody sang standards. I fell in love with the song then, and heard Etta's version later in the movie Pleasantville, and loved it again. Still, I never got around to pursuing her further, until this past Christmas, when I put The Essential Etta James on my Amazon wish list, and received it. I'd been listening to it a lot in the car when I heard that she was coming to Boulder in concert. I decided that I needed to go, and I found a fantastic ticket online: 2nd row aisle seat.

When I got there, I was thrilled to find that it was indeed one of the best seats in the house. I had a perfect sightline to everything, and was wonderfully close. There was an unannounced opening act, which was a drag -- I'd asked Laura to cover childcare so I could get to the show on time. If I'd known, I'd certainly have come much later. Anyhow, after that, stagehands started setting up Etta's stage, including a big comfy leather seat with the word "Etta!" inscribed on the front. At 9:00, her band filed onstage, along with somebody who didn't introduce himself. He greeted the crowd, said "Miss James is in the house!", and then introduced The Roots Band. (Not The Roots, who appear on Jimmy Fallon's talk show, but rather just a bunch of touring musicians.) It was cool -- a horn section, two guitarists, keyboard, bass, and drums. So then The Roots Band proceeds to vamp for 10 minutes.

Finally, Etta herself comes out, sits on the chair, and opens with "Come To Mama," a song from Seven Year Itch that I'd known previously when Bob Seger recorded it (as "Come To Papa.") In Seger's hands, the song has a clear sexual subtext. Coming from James, the subtext becomes supertext, with lyrics like "If you feel like a horse chomping at the bit / Call my number, 777-6969, I'll get you a fix." But lyrics aside, OH MY GOD. It was easily the most sexual performance I'd ever seen, and I've seen both Tori Amos and Liz Phair (the latter of whom suffered a wardrobe malfunction that exposed her bare breast to the audience for the better part of a song.) Etta sang the entire song while absolutely pawing herself, and I mean her entire body, giving special emphasis to lines like "I've got your favorite toy / Guaranteed to bring you joy." We are talking about a 71-year-old woman here, a grandmother, whose son is actually in the band, as her drummer. It was, to say the least, a little shocking. I wasn't really bothered by it (though as a friend of mine pointed out, would you want to watch your mother doing that night after night?), but I was pretty floored. She continued in that vein the entire show. She never stood up, but her hands never rested much either. When singing "I'd Rather Go Blind," she elaborated: "Sittin here thinkin' of your kiss, and your... mmmmm, you all know what I'm talkin' about." And the song after that was called, "I Want To Ta-Ta You, Baby."

While Etta's libido has never waned (at least if her stage shtick is to be believed), I'm afraid the same can't be said for her mind. For one thing, she clearly thought she was in Canada. "It's been a long time since I've played in Canada!" she said. "I'm so happy to be back!" I thought she was joking at first, but then in the next song, she introduced her guitarist with, "This is Joshua. He's Canadian, too!" She also introduced "I'd Rather Go Blind" by saying, "Here's a song my sons and I wrote together." Now, that song was first recorded in 1969, when James was 31 years old. The Internet doesn't seem to want to tell me when her sons were born, but it does tell me that the song is co-credited to Ellington Jordan, not Donto and Sametto James. Oh, and then there was the long introduction where she said she was going to do a song by one of the baddest chicks of all time, Janis Joplin, and that song is called, "You Can Leave Your Hat On." Written by Randy Newman. In 1972. Two years after Joplin died. All I could do was shake my head and laugh.

Her voice, though, still sounds amazing. She kept stealing glances at the lyric sheet next to her, but that didn't stop her from nailing every single note. She also had a terrific stage presence, despite remaining seated the entire time. She was always playfully, bawdily bantering with the audience, even as she was performing songs. In "You Can Leave Your Hat On," after she sang the line, "Suspicious minds are talking / They're trying to tear us apart," she would very clearly mouth the words "FUCK THEM." It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, while the music was great, I didn't get to hear it for very long -- at 9:55, she said good night, and walked off stage, only to immediately drive back on astride a little red Rascal scooter. She sat back down in the chair and sang "At Last", sounding phenomenal. And then... that was it. She left, stage lights came up, just an hour after the band had come on. That was very disappointing to me, as the ticket hadn't been cheap. I quite understand that it's probably hard on her to play very long, but if the length of your show is going to be much less than is conventionally accepted, your ticket price should be well below the standard too.

All in all, it was one of the strangest shows I'd ever seen. I loved the music, and was greatly amused by the rest. But I sure wish I'd known to come late, and been ready to leave early.

Watchmen

2009-03-21T23:22:03Z

I've just seen Watchmen again, this time in IMAX, and now I think I'm ready to write about it. There are a number of people (say, for example, Adam) who found the Watchmen graphic novel to be one of the best things ever. I do not fall into this group. Don't get me wrong -- I love Alan Moore, and I liked the book very much, but I didn't find it overwhelmingly compelling and revelatory in the way that some people do. To me it felt like a good, well-written story that resisted superhero clichés in some interesting ways. A solid B or B+.

Now, I think there were a couple of things working against me at the time I read it. One was the fact that I read it in the mid-90s rather than the mid-80s. By that time, various aspects of it had been frequently imitated in various ways, and what was revolutionary and groundbreaking about it no longer seemed so.

Laura has a story about being assigned Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a college class, and complaining to the professor, "These guys write in such a clichéd style, it's driving me crazy!" To which her professor of course replied, "No, no, see, these guys invented this style. It was their thousands of imitators who turned it into a cliché." Well, I had a bit of the Hammett/Chandler effect going when I read Watchmen, even though intellectually I understood that Moore was the originator. His ideas just couldn't have the same impact on me that they would have had if I'd read them first.

My other disadvantage is the fact that the book is so highly and universally praised. Reading something after hearing bunches of people call it The Most Awesome Thing Ever I Mean Ever can hardly help but be a slightly disappointing experience. It's the expectation theory.

Well, having read quite a bit of the press around the movie and how it compares to the book, I think it's safe to say that I missed entire layers of that book in my first reading. I'd really love to reread the graphic novel, perhaps with some kind of Annotated Watchmen alongside it. (Okay Watchmen book, go stand over there in the line marked "to read." Yes, I know there are 112 books in the line. Hey, I pick randomly from the group, so maybe you'll get lucky.) Like the book, I think the movie benefits from repeated viewings. I know I was catching things this time around that completely passed me by on the first viewing. However, my overall opinion remains the same, which is that it is a very enjoyable superhero movie, with a great story, some excellent writing, magnificent visuals, and a couple of sublime performances, but it is also significantly flawed in certain ways.

IF YOU'RE READING THIS ON FACEBOOK: THE SPOILERS START HERE.

The first of these is that it is far too much in love with violence, which leads it to undermine one of its story's main points. From almost the first moment of the movie, characters are punching through solid walls and withstanding beatings that would stagger a rhino, not to mention performing phenomenal feats of strength and speed. Watching these fights, it is impossible to believe that these people are not somehow enhanced, and the fact that the so-called superheroes are not enhanced (with the notable exception of Dr. Manhattan) is supposed to be crucial to the story. In addition, some of those fights are gratuitously gory -- I was really tired of seeing people's bones broken by the end of this film. Another flaw, though one far less in director Zack Snyder's control, is that the main source of tension in the narrative is the idea of impending nuclear war between the US and the USSR, an idea which has lost most of its emotional resonance today. Viewed as a period piece (despite the fact that it's set in an alternate universe, it still operates as a period piece), it's fine. Then again, as huskyscotsman points out, the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight now, so maybe I'm just far too complacent.

Some people have faulted Snyder for hewing too closely to the source material, but that's actually one of the things I enjoyed the most about Watchmen. The movie lifts entire scenes, dialogue intact, from the comic, which means that much of its dialogue is quite a bit better than that of the average superhero movie. In addition, it was quite wonderful to see these characters and this world brought to life so faithfully. I don't know whether somebody who hadn't read the book would react adversely, but for me it was the thrill of seeing static images come to life. The entire visual atmosphere of the movie is outstanding. The color palette is exactly what it should be, Rorschach's mask looks perfect, Dr. Manhattan's glow is just right.

Oh, and I think the opening credits sequence is one of the best I've seen in any movie, ever. It manages to pack in an enormous amount of exposition about the characters and their world, all without any dialogue. It does this via a series of striking images which are both reference-heavy (Silk Spectre I's retirement dinner as Last Supper; Silhouette taking the sailor's place in the famous V-J day kiss) and highly interconnected (flashbulbs, historical recreations), something that captures the Alan Moore spirit exquisitely. It mixes humor and horror, often within moments of each other, and manages to tell a poignant story of forty-five years in just five minutes. Masterful.

Speaking of masterful, and of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, those two characters get the best performances of the film. Billy Crudup's voice work captures his character's not-quite-detachment completely, and Jackie Earle Haley is freaking phenomenal every moment he's on screen as Rorschach. In some moments, he manages to convey enormous emotions from behind a mask, just using his body, his voice, and the shape of his face beneath the fabric. Once the mask is off, he's even more powerful.

Then there's Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He certainly nails the character of The Comedian, but that character has always puzzled me. Watchmaniacs, please be patient while I plod through my thought process, and keep in mind it's been like 15 years since I read the book. So here you have a milieu of heightened, explicit symbolism. Doctor Manhattan is both a genius and a living nuclear weapon. Nite Owl has big goggles, and a bunch of owl-themed gadgets. Rorschach sees the world in black and white, and his "face" is made up of moving black blobs on a white field. And so on. In this world, you have a character called The Comedian, who is never funny, and never makes a joke. Sure, he laughs a lot, but it's a bitter, cynical kind of laugh. In fact, he'd be more appropriately called The Cynic. It's not because the story lacks for humor, either. I mean, yeah, it's a dark story, but there are certainly plenty of comedic moments. Heck, even Rorschach gets off a bunch of good one-liners in the prison scenes. So the character whose theme is comedy is in fact the least funny, and the most horrifying, at least on a personal level.

Nobody seems to comment on this, except for Rorschach, who claims that The Comedian "saw the true face of the 20th century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it." Except, as I said, he's not funny. Now, I know that comedy and horror are not strangers, and I understand that exaggeration is a comical tool, so is The Comedian's over-the-top repulsiveness a comic exaggeration of human savagery? I would argue that it is not. Comedy, even brutal satire, works because it has a moral center, an oppositional point of view. It may shock, it may exaggerate, and it may distort, but it does not simply personify or repeat. It works toward healing, or at least toward tearing down the things it opposes, not amplifying them. The Comedian is more like a parody of a parody -- where a parody would exaggerate in order to show ridiculousness, he exaggerates but without questioning. Where a parody would personify human savagery in order to decry it, he personifies human savagery because, well, he kinda digs it. In fact, it's completely unclear why he's even a superhero at all. The closest hint we get is when Hooded Justice is attacking him for his attempted rape of Silk Spectre I. "Is this what gets you off?" he asks, while receiving a beating. Maybe it takes one to know one.

That smiley face icon is strangely appropriate for him, if we take it as the ultimate symbol of empty cheer. If the smiley in culture is an attempt to pretend that the darkness doesn't exist, it's sledgehammer irony to put it on the darkest character in the book. In Watchmen, that illusion can't sustain itself. It's bloodstained. Just as it repudiates the emptiness of cheerful Golden Age superheroes, just as it takes an extremely dim view of human nature, arguing that the only cure for warfare is a common enemy, so must it mutilate the icon of simpleminded sunniness. In itself, I don't know that this subversion of cheery fantasy is a bad thing, but I'm not sure I agree with the so-called reality that replaces it. In my real world, humor can be a healing force. In Watchmen, there aren't many of those kind of laughs around, whether or not The Comedian is dead.

Goodbye Rocky

2009-03-01T01:55:21Z

I'm feelng a weird kind of grief today, because the Rocky Mountain News just closed. It was both sudden and not sudden. The writing had been on the wall for a long time. There are conflicting stories about the reason, or rather reasons. There's the economy, of course. There's Craigslist, which has drained millions away from classified ads by offering a better product, for free. Newspapers all over the country are struggling for those reasons. Denver had some peculiar circumstances alongside these. It was one of the last non- consolidated newspaper towns. I remember when I was taking media classes at NYU in 1988, even then the prof was saying that the vast majority of major cities had only one newspaper, or multiple newspapers owned by the same conglomerate. Denver was the exception back then, and remained so until 2001, when the RMN and the Denver Post consolidated. Now, things have contracted further, and the News has died. Scripps, its corporate owner, tried to find a buyer for it, but the smart money is not buying newspapers these days. A good summary of the reasons for the paper's demise is here. (I'd recommend against reading the comments. Actually, that holds true for almost everything on the Internet.)

The sudden part was that the closing was announced on Thursday night, and the final edition of the paper was on Friday. Just like that. That final edition had lots of good stuff about the Rocky's history (it was just short of its 150th birthday) and reflections on what the paper has meant. Most of those stories were prepared ahead of time, I'm sure. Still, it feels so strange to have the announcement and the end so close together.

I grew up with the Rocky Mountain News. It's the newspaper I've been reading since I was able to read. It has a feature called "The Mini Page", a newspaper for kids with puzzles that I used to work through. I've been reading Doonesbury in that paper for more than 25 years, as well as Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Mutts, etc. I wrote a letter to the paper when I was in high school, annoyed at the fingerpointing frenzy over Dungeons & Dragons that was happening at the time. I still remember getting the phone call verifying my identity, and seeing the letter printed alongside a fantasy-oriented drawing. When I went to live in New York, I tried to find a paper that was like the Rocky. I couldn't stand the Post, and found the Village Voice unbearably hipper-than-thou. The Times was good, but had no comics, which was a dealbreaker for me. I finally settled on the Daily News. Still, when I came home, I was very glad to see the Rocky again, and subscribed to it immediately at my dorm. That was while the Newspaper War between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post was still going, and subscriptions were super cheap. When Laura and I started living together, we had the News delivered, and we've read the Spotlight section together every night before going to bed, for the last 10 years or so.

Now it's gone. The Denver Post arrived at our doorstep this morning. I'm sure we'll continue our subscription -- we value the newspaper too much to not get one. Still, it feels like a step down. I loved the News's pop music writer, and the one from the Post feels like he was trained at the Village Voice school of indie snobbery. Also, the Post is in this very annoying broadsheet format. I loved the Rocky's tabloid arrangement, but the Post forces a whole lot of unfolding and re-folding. Endlessly bothersome. Some of the writers from the Rocky came over, and all of the comics did, but it's not the same.

I miss my Rocky already.

Earth And Sky -- live transcripts

2009-02-16T03:18:39Z

I wrote a series of superhero-themed interactive fiction games called Earth And Sky. If you're interested in learning what the games are like without actually, y'know, playing them, you may be in luck.

Recently, a group of IF enthusiasts over at ifMUD played through all three games in a chatroom environment, as part of a venture called Club Floyd. Floyd is a bot on the mud who can act as a game interpreter, so a group of people can (virtually) gather to play a game in Floyd's room. This makes for a lovely combination of playing, kibitzing, snarking, and even the occasional insight or analysis. I showed up for the sessions, so I was sometimes able to offer a bit of information about the making of the games.

Transcripts are here:

Part 1: Earth And Sky

Part 2: Another Earth, Another Sky

Part 3: Luminous Horizon

Replacing LAUNCHcast

2009-02-11T21:06:45Z

I've mentioned here a few times before that I love my LAUNCHcast station. I created a custom station there (after being driven from the previously shuttered radio.sonicnet, and Imagine Radio before that) in 2003, and over the course of the next five years rated a total of 25,094 artists, albums, and songs.

Imagine my chagrin when I was informed via email at the end of last year that CBS Radio is taking over LAUNCHcast, and that customized stations will be eliminated. After a quick trip through the stages of grief, I started in on the project of finding a new fix for my internet radio jones.

I had a few requirements:

I want to be able to construct a station based on a fixed list of artists, with the occasional movie or show soundtrack thrown in, e.g. Rocky Horror or West Side Story. I'd try to put it together using the list of artists I'd added to my LAUNCHcast station.
I want to be able to adjust that station at will.
I want to hear new artists, ones that aren't on my list but that I have a chance of liking based on who is on the list.

Based on a bit of Googling, I identified five candidates: last.fm, Slacker, Pandora, mystrands, and Jango. Then I tried them out, one by one. I took a lot of notes during that process. On the off chance that those might be worthwhile to somebody, I post them here:

LAST.FM

This is a limited model -- not exactly what I'm looking for. You can't rate artists -- only start a station based on one artist to find similarities. There's a flavor that bases a playlist on things I've played on my machine with iTunes or WMP, but that's too passive for my tastes.

SLACKER

This one has potential. It's a more binary model than launchcast -- you don't rate an artist, but rather just request songs from that artist. However, it at least does allow by-artist customization. I ran into a hard limit early on -- after rating 50 songs, it wanted me to upgrade. I may do it just to try -- it's only four bucks a month.

Oh, ah, there is a way to just add artists without requesting songs, though so far the playlist HEAVILY favors requested songs, even though I only requested a handful. Oh, hrm, when I looked at my settings, something called "Favorites" was set to maximum. Did I do that by accident?

Okay, yes, there is definitely a way to do this with a focus on artists rather than songs. It also does a nice job of introducing new artists into the mix -- you can even configure how much it does this. However, the one drawback is that it remains binary -- you can't just say "I only want Madonna rarely" -- she's either on or off.

For some reason, I really like the "up next" feature.

Also, I can't seem to find any soundtracks -- i.e. Rocky Horror, Avenue Q, or Once More With Feeling. Amy Ray is missing. [She's since been added.]

Okay, here's a pisser: I'm in the midst of adding artists, and about 75 artists into the process, as the station is playing, an ad takes over the display. When I can finally return to the "edit station" display, all my changes are wiped out. Son of a BITCH!! Now I have to save every 5 minutes to be sure I won't lose anything. Grrrrr...

After being spurred to investigate by The Beatles having played on Pandora, I created an experimental "Got Beatles?" station on Slacker and confirmed that yep, they've got 'em! Woo! For some reason, Launchcast would never let me play The Beatles on my customized station, though they did on their preprogrammed stations.

PANDORA

You can also build an artist-based station here, but again it's only binary -- can't rate artists. Can also feature songs. Lots of similarities to slacker, actually -- a different method of artist discovery, I think, and a bit less configurable. Slightly neater interface. Could find Rocky Horror, Avenue Q, and Amy Ray, which is a plus. And -- WHOA -- The Beatles! Man, that makes me really wonder if Slacker has them. That is a big plus over Launchcast.

Can't find: Chappaquiddick Skyline, Jimmy Fallon, OMWF, Steve Martin, Sprites.

Entry seems to bog down a bit once lots of artists are in the list. Gets a bit crashy too. Ooh, but seems to have figured out to heal itself by displaying full list. Nifty!

Slacker updates the tab name with the song playing -- Pandora doesn't. That's getting really annoying to me the more I listen to Pandora -- it's much more intrusive at work to have to bring up the browser window. Not a good combination with trying to introduce a lot of new music, either.

Can't add artist to station from the currently playing song! Can only add the song. Similarly, can't ban an artist, seemingly at all. Ah, okay, it appears that downthumbing two songs from that artist will do it, unless the artist is a seed or has a thumbed-up song. That seems sensible enough. Because of the distinction between songs and artists that is so encoded into both Pandora and Slacker, I'm wary of doing much song rating.

Slacker lets you upload your own image for a station, which is minor, but cool. [Though this feature has since been shuffled into oblivion. Slacker has changed a lot in the last 2 months!]

Pandora doesn't seem to have on-air ads, which is a big plus. You can pay for slacker to eliminate these, which is really not such a big deal, I guess.

Pandora seems to try harder not to play the artists I've input, despite my having input about 200. That's both a vice and a virtue, I suppose.

Whoa, just played two versions of "leaving on a jet plane" with only 3 songs separating them. That's glitchy!

The four-song set thing can feel a little chunky at times.

MYSTRANDS

This one is closer to the Last.FM model -- you download a desktop application and then play your own local songs. It listens in and recommends new music. In fact, based on the FAQ, it looks like it doesn't even play you the music it recommends -- you can listen to 30 second samples. This is so far from what I'm looking for that I didn't bother to download it.

JANGO

Okay, this is another "list of artists" one. Once again, no apparent rating system for the artists -- just binary. This is very frustrating -- I think that's the feature of Launchcast I'm going to miss the most.

From what I can tell, there's not as much of an emphasis on favoriting songs, though there is a mechanism to do so when they play. Also, you can opt to rate songs by an artist from the "edit station" page, but it only offers them to you 10 at a time -- there's no search option. As far as I can determine, it shows you all the songs in its library for that artist, in batches. This reveals some surprisingly thin spots in the library -- only 5 songs for Bob Seger? Slacker and Pandora may also have such gaps, but they don't show it.

Interestingly, the *song* rating system does allow some levels. Well, two -- "I like it" and "I love it". Oh, and I guess there's a third -- "I don't like it" -- but that's more of an "off" button.

The display gets buggy after you can't find an artist you tried to add. There are some annoying javascripty problems in part of the interface -- you have to be very careful with where your mouse pointer goes or else you'll lose the current display.

Also freaky: I type "Bill Cosby", it adds "Black Sheep." I type "Chrissie Hynde", it adds "Christini."

Lets you upload a picture. There is more of an emphasis on the "social" part than in Slacker or Pandora, even a Facebooky feature that combs through your address book to find who among your friends is a Jango person. Sadly for Jango, I do not care about the social thing at all, just the radio.

Like Pandora, no update of the browser title bar (or the tab) to indicate the currently playing song.

Oh, now here's an interesting feature -- it lets you recall and *replay* songs that have played on your station, as well as play other songs related to the one currently playing. That is very cool, and a bit shocking to me based on how everybody else seems to be handling DMCA policies. Interestingly, I clicked on a Tori Amos song and it played the song, but displays that it's now playing "Station 1 - Jane Siberry." I guess the technicality they're using to get around the ban on play-on-demand is that they're ostensibly switching you to somebody else's station.

Missing: Sinead Lohan, Rocky Horror, Jimmy Fallon, Lone Justice (!), Northern State (!!), Graham Parker (!!! -- seriously, WTF?), Once More With Feeling, Avenue Q, Greg Brown, Great Northern, Marvelous 3, Sprites, Grace Slick.

There's no way I can see to view a history of what's played. That's a big gap.

There's a "music discovery control" which allows you to set how many new artists get played. There are only 3 settings, which amount to none, some, and a lot. I set it to "some", but still haven't heard a new artist yet. It's been playing for 90 minutes and counting. Actually, a closer look reveals that the control is more about what's popular and what isn't, which may not be the same thing as "artist discovery."

FAQ says there's a way to ban artists from the "edit station" page, but I don't see it, unless it's to add the artist and then remove them, which would be a very silly way to implement that feature. Also, I see no way to "un-ban" an artist.

I cannot find anything to tell me what album a particular song comes from. Which is a bummer when I hear an unfamiliar new song from an artist I know well, or a live version, etc. The closest it comes is letting me trawl Amazon. Which, really: not that close.

There is a weird amount of artist repetition. I've heard Nina Simone 3 times in 2.5 hours, and Pasty Cline twice. I wonder if this is another knock-on effect of having an abbreviated library. I wouldn't think so, though -- I've added over 200 artists! I have restarted the station a couple of times while experimenting, but still, it's strange those artists would get repeated anyway, given the wide selection from which this station can pick. Also, still no new artists at 2.5 hours and counting.

Overall, this seems like a cut-rate version of Slacker -- poorer interface, fewer songs, fewer artists. The "song on demand" thing is mighty cool, though.

The winner: Slacker! Though in my opinion it's still not as good as LAUNCHcast, I've managed to build a station I'm reasonably happy with. Pandora was a relatively close second.

My new Slacker station is called Giant Leaps, after the game I'm writing for Textfyre [Wow, that page says my game will be released in March! I will be quite shocked if that happens. Though it doesn't say March of what year...] and the wide variety of music I've tried to include in it.

1893 review

2009-01-22T23:42:12Z

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I've written a review of Peter Nepstad's epic IF game 1893 for IF-Review.

A for enthusiasm, C- for style

2009-01-12T05:45:53Z

Okay, I'm glad that Women's Basketball magazine exists. Really, I am. But man oh man, does it ever have some bad writing. Check out this recent article opener:

As the 2009 NCAA women's basketball campaign gets under way, "change" is in the air.

Yep. That theme is not limited to aspirants who have been seeking residency at a house bathed in white at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C.

"A house bathed in white"? Such a poetic turn of phrase, but whatever do you mean? Oh, I see, you'll be qualifying that further. But wait, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave [That's "Ave" as in "Ave Maria", given that the abbreviation for avenue has a period at the end] in what city? You could mean any bathed-in-white-house that happens to have that address!

Or how about this one:

"You can't turn it on and turn it off. You have to play your best all the time."

That coaching cliché has been accepted as gospel truth since the first Olympics back in 776 BCE, if not the first mammoth hunt, and every player has heard it pronounced over and over again as though it is written in stone in some secret, sacred cave.

I love how the mammoth hunt part is presented as conjecture but the 776 BCE part comes across as straightforward fact. Thanks, time-traveling reporter! Oh, and I cheer for "secret, sacred cave", not just because of the wonderful sound of it, but because it's just the sort of place you'd expect to find something that's repeated over and over again to everyone.

This article also goes on to explain that the Detroit Shock have definitively disproven this eternal gospel truth. Talk about making history!

These articles remind me of nothing so much as some of the lamer student papers I've received. I'm just waiting for one to begin, "Webster's Dictionary defines 'winning' as..."

Angel Season 5

2008-12-01T22:17:11Z

Oh, it's a sad, sad day. It's now official: I've seen every episode of every Joss Whedon show. I suppose it's a happy day, really -- it's been a very satisfying journey since the day I saw Serenity (October 1, 2005, as it happens.) Still, I can't help feeling a little grief at the fact that I'll never watch another new episode of Buffy or Angel.

Well, at least I had a good sendoff. I was quite pleased with this season of Angel. Like season 7 of Buffy, the show found its feet again after a dreary and depressing previous season. It was both funny and thrilling, with a solid premise that was low on the endless angst and high on the superheroics of old. Not only that, it had a lovely elegiac quality, bringing back moments and characters from previous seasons like some kind of victory lap, or maybe a greatest hits album.

[Psst! If you're reading this on Facebook, my spoiler protection tags have been stripped out! Spoilers ahoy from this point forward, for all seasons of Angel, and lots of Buffy as well.]

1. From the first scene of the first episode, we get good news: this show is funny again. Hallelujah! In previous seasons, the humor would drop off for long, long stretches, making the whole exercise feel rather dank. This time, though, bright moments of comedy sparkle all the way through. There's Conviction, of course, which sets the terms. Damn, that Joss is funny. He would be a great comedy writer if that were all he did. Oh, and of course Life Of The Party, the obligatory everybody-gets-mind-alteration episode. Like Spin The Bottle or The Shroud of Rahmon before it, mystically changing people's personalities leads to hilarious results. Oh, and then there's Harm's Way. Harmony is consistently funny to me, and this episode got some great laughs out of her character, even while telling a solid story. I was pleased to see Mercedes McNab appear in the opening credits halfway through the season, even though she never did really emerge as a major character. It was great to see Tom Lenk, too, in Damage & The Girl In Question. I really loved him as Andrew in season 7 of Buffy, and he didn't disappoint here. Speaking of The Girl In Question, Angel and Spike as nerds getting shown up by the cool kid is a funny premise, executed well.

2. I think this is the first season of Buffy or Angel to have no real "Big Bad." I suppose it could be argued that the situation itself is the Big Bad, which is a rather ingenious turn of events. The ongoing difficulties of trying to do good from inside the belly of the beast made for a satisfying conflict. It opened up more space for superheroics, without losing complexity.

3. Speaking of superheroics, this season boasted a pleasant abundance of superhero stuff, in both overt and oblique references:

The Fred/Spike dynamic at the beginning of the season is a bit like the Reed Richards/Ben Grimm dynamic in the first several years of The Fantastic Four, minus the guilt. She keeps trying to cure him of his condition, and despite her brilliance she continues to fail. In the end, she never succeeds -- the solution comes from a left field deus ex machina.
There's a trope in superhero comics, wherein via flashback (or sometimes an entire series), we learn about the adventures of superheroes who fought one or more generations before the ones we're used to following. The Cautionary Tale Of Numero Cinco felt like an entertaining riff on that "Superheroes of the Golden Age" theme.
Then there were the overt references, all of which were fun:
- Why We Fight -- Hodge: "I'm telling you, he's some sort of super soldier, l-like Steve Rogers or Captain America." Spinelli: "Steve Rogers is Captain America, you eightball."
- Smile Time -- Knox (upon seeing pictures of comatose smiling kids): "Right. Could be the Joker. From the comic books? Just trying to think outside the box."
- Shells -- Gunn (about Illyria's time-slowing trick): "Yeah, like she was pulling a Barry Allen. (Angel looks at him, not recognizing the name; Gunn looks around at the others) Jay Garrick? Wally— Like she was moving really fast."
As in the final season of Buffy, we've now collected enough continuity that it's time for that tried-and-true plot mechanic, the returning supervillain! I quite liked Lindsey's arc this season (though Lindsey himself was highly irritating), and it was also fun to see Sahjahn again, even if just for a moment.

4. Lindsey and Sahjahn weren't the only callbacks to earlier points in Buffyverse history -- this season was rife with them:

Nods to the sappy sides of our bloodthirsty heroes in Hellbound -- Angel: "I never told anybody about this, but I... I liked your poems." Spike (frowning): "You like Barry Manilow." Oh, and the return of Spike's poems in Not Fade Away.
Beyond the appearance of Lindsey himself, there's the fact that he calls himself "Doyle"! We even get a bit of Glenn Quinn on the monitor in You're Welcome.
Speaking of You're Welcome, I'd say the return of Cordelia qualifies as nostalgia at this point. I was less than satisfied with the way said return was handled, about which a bit more later.
The Connor guest shots (in Origin and Not Fade Away) were better -- it was refreshing to see how appealing the character could be when he wasn't constantly in a snit.
I loved the way that Damage built on the continuity established in season 7 of Buffy. The idea of Spike and Angel encountering one of the many newly minted Slayers was crying out to happen, and having her be a reflection of the victims in their guilty pasts was an excellent twist.
Fred's parents reappearing in The Girl In Question was the best thing the show could have done to make me feel sad about her death.
In that same episode, it was fun to get one more whirl with Darla and Drusilla, albeit only in flashback.
Same goes for Andrew, minus the flashback part and plus Damage.
Then in Not Fade Away we get one more look at Julia Lee as Anne Steele (and I am always more than happy to have another look at her!) and a little shout-out to Gunn's old crew.

I ended up feeling quite pleased with all these reappearances. Cycling through these touchpoints gave this final season of Buffyverse TV a real sense of closure.

5. I quite like the way that the season kept returning to its unifying theme of "defending innocence." In the last episode of season 4, Angel warns that if his gang decides to take the Wolfram & Hart tour being offered by Dead Lilah, "before the ride's even over, before you even cross through their doors, you'll be corrupted." Then they do so anyway, and spend all of season five trying to prove that statement wrong. That's a great tension upon which to base a season, and many individual episodes revisited the question from various angles.

Once again, Joss sets the terms in Conviction. That episode does a brilliant job of interrogating the idea of innocence, choosing to set its main story in the very battleground of innocence, a courtroom. That the gang must keep justice at bay from a man who is clearly guilty, in order to protect the world from the danger posed by that man's innocent son, is a perfect start to their slog through the moral morass that is Wolfram & Hart. Angel's vigorous crunch into Eve's apple is a lovely symbolic moment, setting off an arc that ends in Not Fade Away with his comment to her about being thrown out of the garden.

Eve herself displays an intriguing set of developments, seeming at first to be the snake in the garden, contrary to her name. Bit by bit, though, we learn that she is not nearly as worldly as she at first appears. We get our first glimpse of vulnerability at the end of Life Of The Party -- she's just dismissed any emotional consequence to her mystically-influenced coupling with Angel, but as she turns away from him and towards the camera, her face twists in anger. That vulnerability flowers in her attachment to Lindsey, and in that moment of the final episode, as she (apparently) sacrifices herself to despair, it is clear that she has become the naive one, and the power is with Angel once more.

Speaking of Angel's "groin buddies", Nina the Werewolf is trying desperately not to become a destructive monster, mirroring the struggle of our heroes in this season. She also wants to stay closeted from her family, protecting them from the frightening world that has claimed her. In this way, she reflects Angel's decision to alter reality, erasing the memories of his son and his friends -- he decides on their behalf that they are better off not knowing. I appreciated the fact that the show revisited this decision in Origin, and that it never fully resolves the question of whether innocence must be tied to ignorance. For Connor, we suspect (and get confirmation in Not Fade Away) that he is able to integrate the truth about himself without losing his soul to the darkness. With Wesley, on the other hand, I get the sense that once he uncovers the mystery, he wishes he could have remained in the dark.

A number of Little Bad episodes also rung changes on the theme, none more piercingly than Damage, which links the shredded innocence of deranged slayer Dana to that of Angel and Spike themselves, who were, after all, once victims of a horrific fate. Like them, Dana lost her innocence long before the heroes could jump in and defend it -- all they can do is deal with the consequences of horror. We get a more hopeful parallel in The Cautionary Tale Of Numero Cinco, in which Numero Cinco represents not only a more innocent time in the fight against evil, but also a parallel to Angel's essence, on a journey where both rediscover hope and purpose. Smile Time ends in success, too -- the demons who are looking to sell the "100% pure innocence" of their victims fail in their gambit, thanks to Angel and company. Why We Fight is closer to Damage -- Lawson sacrificed his soul heroically, but there is no way to avoid the consequences of that sacrifice. All Angel can do is euthanize him.

When we see Angel give up the baby to the Fell Bretheren in Time Bomb, alarm bells start ringing. Here, in a season all about the defense of innocence, we see the ultimate symbol of innocence seemingly defenseless against embodiments of evil. Luckily for us, Angel has "gone dark" so many times that now the way to confound the audience's expectations is to have him actually remain a hero. Thank god! I was getting very tired of that particular groove, and was relieved to see this final season skip it. (Even the surprise-by-staying-good trick was more powerfully done in Enemies, the season 3 Buffy episode.) Still, Whedon never lets us off the hook that easily. Fred's essence is destroyed for good by Illyria, despite every possible effort being made to save it. Wesley dies too, but he's shown us plenty of darkness in his heart. Really, the greater loss of innocence happens to Lorne, who finally must turn his back on the "unsavory" (albeit heroic) work of the gang when Angel asks him to commit murder. Although Angel does much to protect the souls of many, including his own, his fight isn't always successful.

6. Doesn't it seem like the show is kind of playing fast and loose with the question of whether or not Angel can have sex? It kind of seems like it keeps changing its mind on the topic. I mean, early on (in Untouched, from season 2), Cordelia is all about warning Bethany, "Don't bone my boss." Even as late as Origin, Spike says, "Keep in mind, he can't get laid without maybe going crazy." Yet not only does he do it with Eve (which, arguably, he didn't have a choice about), but he also has entirely-consensual-no-mystic-influence-whatsoever sex with Nina in Power Play. Sure, they reference the "happy but not perfectly happy" thing, but it still seems like a lot of slippage to me. Er, as it were.

7. I like seeing Gunn with brains, and I really like that he develops a dependency on them. His position as "the muscle" never made a huge amount of sense to me, what with a superpowered vampire standing right next to him. J. August Richards takes on the "human encyclopedia" persona quite ably, and his panic at losing that power made perfect sense in light of his long history of insecurity about his place on the team.

8. Lindsey with muscles and bad snark is way more annoying than the Lindsey I remember. (Not that the Lindsey I remember was a joy.) His patter is especially bad in Not Fade Away -- so much so that I think it must be intentionally irritating, though whether the intentionality is on the part of the character or the writers I'm not sure. It was quite satisfying to see Lorne dispatch him, and I loved Lindsey's crushing disappointment at being killed by "a flunky."

9. Gosh, it was fun to see Adam Baldwin again. Hamilton was a great replacement for Eve, and Baldwin is terrific in the part. (And would you believe, I just today learned that he's not one of the Baldwin brothers? I always just sort of assumed he was. Thanks, Wikipedia!)

10. The "Fred taken over by Illyria" plot is a bit of a rehash of the "Cordelia taken over by Jasmine" plot from last season -- the show even acknowledges this in Shells. The fact that it is rehashed is troubling to me. Whedon is certainly known for his strong heroines, but now twice in a row, he has used the violation and destruction of a woman as a cetral plot point in Angel. Once, okay, but if you're going to use the same basic motif, did it really need to be Fred as the victim? It seems to me that Gunn, Lorne, Wesley, or even Spike would have been more interesting, less hidebound choices. I don't like the fact that twice in a row, the show had to build its dramatic capital by having a bunch of men freak out about saving a damsel in distress, not to mention the fact that they fail both times, and the women involved have virtually no agency in the process.

One thing I did notice in the Fred plot is that unlike in previous seasons, where Angel would always, without fail, choose personal attachment over the good of the world, here he allows Fred to be sacrificed in order to avoid the disastrous consequences of saving her. The good of the many outweighing the good of the few, as it were. Is this a different, more evolved Angel? Well, I'm not sure. He's certainly ready at first to say, "To hell with the world." In fact, he does say that. But somehow, in a way that the episode never quite makes clear, he either backs off or doesn't pursue hard enough. Is it Spike that changes his mind? No, I think that he realizes he's about to do the wrong thing, and stops. What's still not clear to me, though, is whether he's grown into a new moral compass or whether the "tens maybe hundreds of thousands" of people who would have been killed rescuing Fred pass some sort of threshold that's always been there. Given the behavior he displays in the final episodes, where he only pretends to turn into Ends-Justify-Means-Guy, perhaps it's not too hopeful to think he's learning from experience.

11. Episode-specific comments:

Lineage -- I was really pleased when it seemed like Wesley was going to have a reckoning with his father. It seemed like a pivotal moment that his character needed in order to shed some long-held baggage. I was quite disappointed that the reality of it was overturned at the last minute. I wonder -- was he easier to kill because this crucial incident was only a fake-out?
Destiny -- Again, what is with the business of Spike claiming that he fought for his soul? That is revisionist history, is it not? It seems as if the show has accepted this version of events, but that is surely not how I read his behavior at the end of Buffy season 6.
You're Welcome -- Okay, maybe I am dense, but this episode made no frickin' sense to me. So Cordelia is corporeal, seemingly herself in every way except that she doesn't sleep. So she's a... what? Not a vampire, clearly. A zombie, except fully alert? A ghost, except totally corporeal (unlike ghost-Spike) and functionally not a ghost in any apparent way? A higher power manifest on earth in a way we've never actually seen her be before? I take it that we're supposed to figure out that she drew the curtains over her own dying body at the beginning, but if that's so, what body is she walking around in? Then she transfers the visions to Angel, seemingly, and somehow he knows it was a "one-shot deal." The whole thing was just a big "Wha...?" to me. Or is this supposed to be one of those The-Mysterious-And-Never-To-Be-Explained-Powers-That-Be-May-Alter-Logic-And-Reality-At-Their-Whims-Woo-Woo type of deals? Because, thumbs down to those types of deals. When Angel got that call, it felt like somebody lowering a sign into the frame reading "Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet."
Smile Time -- At first, I thought I was really going to hate this episode. Ever since I became a parent, I find stories about the seduction and destruction of children almost too upsetting to tolerate. However, once Angel became a puppet, it just got great. I absolutely loved the bit about him having the relative excitability of a puppet.

Favorite moments:
Conviction -- Gunn: "We can switch if you don't like the—you know, the kung pao or whatever." Wesley: "Feng shui." Gunn: "Right. What's that mean again?" Wesley: "That people will believe anything. Actually, in this place, feng shui will probably have enormous significance. I'll align my furniture the wrong way and suddenly catch fire or turn into a pudding."
Conviction -- Phone menu voice: "You have reached ritual sacrifice. For goats, press one, or say 'goats.'"
Conviction -- Angel: "What? I'm not allowed to hit people?" Wesley: "Not people capable of genocide." Angel: "Those are exactly the types of people I should be allowed to hit!"
Just Rewards -- Spike: (as the remains of a former employee are carried in by the bucketful) "Ol' buckets here was right. You guys are doing a bang-up job."
Just Rewards -- Angel: "Yeah, well, sharing's not something Spike does very well." Harmony: "Preaching to the horse's mouth."
Unleashed -- Lorne (to Angel): "No, it's talking you need... or maybe a shoulder to—" Angel: "I'm not gonna cry either." Lorne: "I was going to a leaning place."
Life Of The Party -- Knox: "And how do you know your spell-casters didn't screw up the payload?" Wesley: "Because I went over the work and I got that knowing feeling you get when you know something."
Life Of The Party -- Angel (in the midst of making out with Eve): "I mean, do you even have a last name?" Eve: "Do you?"
Life Of The Party -- "Positive attitude Spike" is totally hilarious throughout this one. I especially love it when the angry demons burst through the door and he exclaims, "What a fantastic entrance!"
Life Of The Party -- Eve: "Angel, it's not like this is the first time I've had sex under a mystical influence. I went to U.C. Santa Cruz." Also, her abrupt shift of expression as she walks out is very good.
The Cautionary Tale Of Numero Cinco -- The whole running gag of the devil's robot, especially Wesley's automatic knowledge of it: "El Diablo Robotico."
Lineage -- Wesley: (to Fred, after being "comforted" by Angel and Spike) "If you're here to tell me about how you killed your parents... perhaps it could wait for another time."
Soul Purpose -- Gunn: "We open a can of Machiavelli on his ass." Harmony: "It's Matchabelli, Einstein, and it doesn't come in a can." I had to Google it, but once I did: very funny!
Soul Purpose -- Harmony: "Also, any time something comes in with runes on it, I'm supposed to tell Angel immediately... and not try and read the runes myself... 'cause that can cause a fire."
Damage -- Andrew (to Spike): "No problem, brother. You're a troubled hero. Creature of the night. El creatro del noche."
Damage -- Andrew (to Angel): "Think we're just gonna let you take her back to your evil stronghold? Well, as they say in Mexico... No."
Smile Time -- Angel: "I do not have puppet cancer!"
Smile Time -- The whole Angel puppet thing is very funny. I especially liked it when he took his nose off.
Smile Time -- Gunn: "These particular devils have a fairly distinctive M.O." Fred: "They've done this before?" Gunn: "You see the last few seasons of 'Happy Days'?"
A Hole In The World -- Gunn's prank on Wes (and us): "Fred and I are getting back together!"
A Hole In The World -- Fred: "Cavemen win. Of course the cavemen win." A chilling windup to what was just a few moments ago a joke. How very Joss.
A Hole In The World -- Spike's annoyed fusillade of questions towards Drogyn.
Shells -- I love that Illyria believes (as do we) that she's a big apocalyptic monster with an army of doom and she turns out to be wrong.
Shells -- Angel's noble speech about how he would protect Knox interrupted by Wesley, shooting Knox.
Underneath -- Illyria (reminiscing about her dimensional travel): "I traveled all of them as I pleased. I walked worlds of smoke and half-truths, intangible. Worlds of torment and of unnamable beauty. Opaline towers as high as small moons. Glaciers that rippled with insensate lust. And one world with nothing but shrimp. I tired of that one quickly." Awesome Buffy callback.
Origin -- The scene of Spike "testing" Illyria is very funny.
Origin -- Connor (to Angel): "Do you spend all your time making out with other vampires, like in Anne Rice novels?" Angel: "No. Uh -- I used to, but..."
Origin -- Lorne (about Cyvus Vail): "He's powerful. Heads up a large demon empire, has tendrils stretching throughout L.A." Angel: "Tendril-tendrils?" Lorne: "Metaphor-tendrils."
The Girl In Question -- I quite enjoyed the CEO of Rome's W&H branch.
The Girl In Question -- Demon butler: "Oh, look. The Americans are relying on violence to solve their problems. What a surprise."
The Girl In Question -- Final scene, with Angel & Spike. "Movin' on." "Oh, yeah." "Right now." "Movin'."
Not Fade Away -- Angel solving the Hamilton puzzle.

Favorite episodes:
Conviction

And thus it ends. But hey: only 74 days to Dollhouse!

Word Power: The Top 5

2008-11-17T05:46:50Z

To top off my fortnight of word-related posts, I am channeling Rob Gordon and making a Top 5 list of my favorite words, either learned or relearned, from my recent trip through a small thesaurus. I love these words either for their sound, or simply for the fact that they exist.

5. niminy-piminy: Affectedly dainty or refined.

4. rejectamenta: Things thrown away or dismissed.
[I have got to incorporate this one into my repertoire. Though I suppose I should be careful, since it apparently has an excretory connotation -- not that most people hearing it would know that!]

3. absquatulate: To leave in a hurry; depart.

2. hemidemisemiquaver: In music notation, a sixty-fourth note.
[Every time I think of this one, I feel like shouting it out a la Zippy The Pinhead: "Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver!"]

And of course, the Number One favorite word has to be:
1. sesquipedalian: Having many syllables; given to the use of long words.
[I have to love something that so perfectly and beautifully enacts what it describes.]

Oh, and as I mentioned in the comics post, honorable mention goes to "defenestrate."

Words I Learned From Elsewhere

2008-11-14T15:48:26Z

Welcome to the miscellany bin. This post holds all the words that I've learned from various places, ones whose categories couldn't gather enough critical mass to merit a post of their own.

auto da fe: The ceremony accompanying the Spanish Inquisition's execution of a heretic.
[This one comes courtesy of Mel Brooks' History Of The World, Part 1, in which there's a rousing musical number about the Spanish Inquisition: "Auto da fe, what's an auto da fe? / It's what you oughtn't ta do, but you do anyway!"]
ewer: A pitcher.
[I owe my knowledge of this -- and several other entries in this list -- to crossword puzzles. If you get (basically) the same clue for a word from one puzzle to another for long enough, you learn it!]
indemnity: Compensation for a loss, e.g. the payout on a life insurance policy.
[This one comes from a movie as well, in fact a movie title: Double Indemnity. In addition to being an absolutely great film, it's a word teacher as well. Thanks, Billy Wilder!]
oleo: Margarine.
[It's another crossword puzzle special, a word for margarine that I have never heard or seen used outside of a crossword puzzle.]
olio: A mixture or collection; a hodge-podge.
[Or, as it's known in my mind, the crossword puzzle one that isn't margarine.]
sword of Damocles: A constantly impending jeopardy. Based on a legendary Greek courtier who learned the joylessness of a ruler's life when he was allowed all the king's privileges but noticed a sword hanging over his head suspended by a single horsehair.
[For whatever odd reason, two of my three movie vocabulary words come from songs sung in a movie. This one is from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which Rocky sings, "The sword of Damocles is hangin' over my head / And I've got the feeling someone's gonna be cuttin' the thread!"]
tableau: A theatrical depiction of a still picture, performed by silent, motionless actors.
[I learned this word from a stage play, The Fantasticks, which makes a big point of the fact that its first act ends in a tableau, and its second act begins with the same tableau.]
verbatim: Word for word.
[It's not often that I learn a new word from a computer component (although computer people are constantly repurposing words in ways that wrench them away from their original meanings.) However, in the 7th grade or so, I started noticing these 5 1/4" floppy disks in envelopes that read "VERBATIM VERBATIM VERBATIM." Some friendly teacher clued me into the fact that it was an actual word, not just a nonsense company name, and when I looked it up I decided that it was a pretty clever name for a magnetic media company.]
windfall: An unexpected gain or bonus.
[I was quite the board game enthusiast growing up, so much so that I had a closetful of them, and even when I couldn't find anybody to play with me, I'd set up a board anyway and run through a game with imaginary opponents. One of the games in that closet was Parker Brothers' Pay Day, a money management game. One of the events that could happen in that game was a windfall, my first introduction to that all-too-infrequently-encountered term.]

Words I Learned From Television

2008-11-12T14:59:16Z

I don't tend to watch a lot of TV, but the shows I do watch, I tend to cover pretty thoroughly. There must be something in that habit that explains why almost all my TV vocabulary comes from two shows: M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. Turns out you can learn a fair amount from M*A*S*H and The Simpsons!

autoclave: A device for sterilizing surgical instruments with water pressurized to high above its boiling point.
[The autoclave at the 4077th features into several episodes, most prominently in "Operation Friendship", in which Klinger saves Winchester from an exploding one.]
fustigate: Beat or cudgel.
[When Moe maneuvers Homer into a boxing career, he's approached by Lucius Sweet (a thinly veiled Don King character), who asks him to have Homer fight Drederick Tatum (a thinly veiled Mike Tyson character.) Moe has misgivings: "Tatum'll fustigate him!"]
mountebank: A quack or charlatan.
[The greatest vocabulary-building Simpsons episode of all time has got to be "Bart's Friend Falls In Love", in which the B story is that Homer orders a subliminal weight-loss tape but instead ends up with a subliminal increase-your-word-power tape. (Marge: "Homer, has the weight loss tape reduced your appetite?" Homer: "Ah, lamentably no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety.") When he discovers that he's actually been gaining weight, he has a fit of pique: "Those disingenuous mountebanks with their subliminal chicanery! A pox on them!" Surprisingly, there were no combo scores in this episode -- for some reason I happened to know all the other words they used.]
potable: Drinkable liquid.
[Okay, there's one more show that made it to this list: Jeopardy! Vocabulary is the least of what Jeopardy! has to teach, but it definitely taught me this one, due to its frequently-featured category "Potent Potables," all about drinks.]
scapula: Shoulder blade.
[Sometimes, for reasons I can't explain, a little moment will stick in my head. So it was when Hawkeye, in the midst of surgery, asked a nurse to scratch his back, "just under the left infra-scapula." Maybe it stuck in there because I'd never heard the word before?]
slugabed: Lazy person; layabout.
["Look at them, Smithers. Goldbrickers, layabouts, slugabeds! Little do they realize that their days of suckling at my teat are numbered!" Thus speaks Mr. Burns in "Treehouse Of Horror II." Incidentally, I'm certain I first heard goldbrick on M*A*S*H, from Margaret or Frank in reference to Klinger.]
tontine: A group agreement concerning shared property, in which the final surviving member of the group inherits the property.
[This word has the sparkling distinction of appearing in both M*A*S*H and The Simpsons. It showed up in M*A*S*H first, the episode "Old Soldiers", wherein Col. Potter learns that he is the final surviving member of a tontine and inherits the bottle of brandy they'd all found together during WWI. On The Simpsons, it was Grandpa Simpson who was in the tontine with Mr. Burns, as they were allegedly in the same squadron in WWII. They fought over the booty, a cache of paintings from a German castle, in "The Curse Of The Flying Hellfish."]
tracheotomy: A surgical procedure in which a hole is opened in the trachea to allow the patient to breathe, when the windpipe is blocked higher up.
[This one was burned onto my brain by the outstanding episode "Mulcahy's War", in which Father Mulcahy performs an emergency field tracheotomy with instructions radioed from Hawkeye. We get to hear the steps of the operation in explicit detail, as he uses Radar's Tom Mix pocketknife to make the incision, and the shell of a fountain pen as a breathing tube. It's rather IF-like, really. Then, in a later episode ("Point Of View"), we saw the 4077th through the eyes of a soldier who'd undergone a tracheotomy and couldn't talk.]

And finally, one of my favorite COMBO SCOREs of all time is spoken by one of my favorite Simpsons characters:

arglebargle or foofaraw: Argument or disturbance over nothing
[In "Last Exit To Springfield", in which Homer leads a power plant strike, newsman Kent Brockman asks: "Tonight, on Smartline, the power plant strike: arglebargle, or foofaraw?"]

Words I Learned From Role-Playing Games

2008-11-10T17:46:40Z

I went through a long period of loving Dungeons And Dragons and other such RPGs, though I could never quite find the ideal like-minded, theatrical, story-and-character-loving group of peers for it, or so I imagined anyway. Maybe every group stays permanently out of character and treats the whole thing as a gold-grubbing exercise. (Darths And Droids is somewhat persuasive on this point.) Thank you, single-player CRPGs!

Anyway, I kept hearing that these games were going to make me lose the boundary between fantasy and reality, and send me wandering through underground steam tunnels, but instead I just learned some awesome new words.

basilisk: A mythical lizard whose gaze can turn people to stone or kill them. Also sometimes known as a cockatrice.
[Ahhh, the Monster Manual. This was a guide to many of the creatures a D&D character might encounter, complete with their various stats and special abilities. Because the game borrowed liberally from various literary and mythological traditions, it introduced me to many fabulous beasties from those traditions, including this one.]
cant: A secret language.
[If you chose to play a thief in D&D, you could learn "Thieves' Cant", a secret method of communication that would let you talk to other thieves without being understood by anyone else. The concept is based in historical fact, and its RPG equivalent has been rather exhaustively catalogued.]
chutzpah: Unshakable self-confidence; audacity.
[In the RPG Toon, chutzpah was one of the character stats. Characters with a high chutzpah score could pull off ridiculous schemes and convince others to believe patently false things. Bugs Bunny would have a maxed-out chutzpah stat.]
dexterity: Physical skill and grace.
[Speaking of character stats, this is one from the original D&D rules -- characters with a high dexterity could dodge attacks better, and perform difficult feats such as pickpocketing. It's a "common knowledge" word my world now, but it wasn't when I was in 5th grade.]
flail: A medieval weapon consisting of one or more weights swinging freely from a handle via chains.
[Just as the Monster Manual taught me about all manner of creatures, the Player's Handbook introduced me to a dizzying variety of weapons and armor. It would be overwhelming to try to include them all here, so I'm just choosing this one as a representative sample. Others include glaive, greaves, halberd, scimitar, shillelagh, and voulge.]
garrote: A strangling weapon consisting of two handles with a wire, chain, or rope between them.
[Different genres had their different weapons. Thus, while D&D was teaching me about medieval arsenals, I learned about this nasty piece of work from the espionage game Top Secret.]
gelatinous: Dense; viscous.
[One of the wackier monsters in the Monster Manual was the Gelatinous Cube, which is just exactly what it sounds like -- a huge cube of goo which would eat anything organic and spit out anything inorganic.]
golem: An animated creature created from inanimate material such as stone, wood, or metal.
[This was not only another monster, but also something that magic-user characters could create, given sufficient skill. Its real-world origin is in Jewish folklore.]
lycanthropy: The condition of being a werewolf, or some other kind of were-creature.
[Oh, there are so many crazy things that can befall a hapless D&D character, and this is one of them. If you get bitten by a werewolf (or were-rat, or were-bear, or were-whatever), you become lycanthropic yourself. (Unless, of course, you can avail yourself of a Cure Disease spell cast by a 12th-level or higher character, or you eat some belladonna within an hour, which has a 25% chance of curing the condition but will incapacitate you for 1d4 days and has a 1% chance of killing you. If you love yourself some intricate sets of rules with lots of randomness involved, D&D is the game for you.)]
myrmidon: A loyal warrior, based on legends of Achilles' armies against Troy.
[Another fun feature of the Player's Handbook was all the tables of information it contained. Among these were the level tables for each character class, in which each level was given its own title. Thus, "myrmidon" was a level 6 fighter.]
paladin: A noble warrior; paragon of chivalry; heroic champion.
[In Advanced D&D, the Paladin was a specialized sort of fighter, which obtained some special abilities due to its unwavering devotion to the cause of law and justice.]
précis: A summary presentation of information.
[This is another one from Top Secret, in which mission dossiers often included a précis about, for instance, suspected criminal masterminds.]
prestidigitator: One who performs magic tricks involving sleight of hand or other manual feats.
[This one comes from the Player's Handbook table of magic-user levels -- a level 1 magic-user is a prestidigitator. There's one more of these coming up below.]
succubus: A demon who takes the form of a beautiful woman in order to seduce and consume its victim.
[It's another evil beastie from the Monster Manual, this time particularly memorable because, well, let's face it, it was a rather compelling concept (and illustration!) for a young boy.]
thaumaturge: A practitioner of magic.
[The magic-user table actually lists a level 5 character as a "Thaumaturgist," but for some reason, this was the formulation that stuck in my mind. Other noteworthy words from these tables are acolyte, chevalier, curate, druid, filcher, justiciar, magsman, and theurgist.]
will-o'-the-wisp: A ghostly, flickering light, which leads the curious into peril.
[One final entity from the Monster Manual, similar to the gelatinous cube in its lack of animal characteristics. I always found this a captivating idea. Other outre words from the creature compendium: bugbear, doppleganger, harpy, hippogriff, homonculous, kobold, manticore, roc, wight, and wyvern.]

Words I Learned From Rock and Roll

2008-11-08T17:02:14Z

Despite what Allan Bloom would have us believe, rock music can be a source of learning. Behold the many and variegated words (and phrases) I've learned from paying attention to popular music over the years.

abraxas: A mystical word engraved on ancient amulets and charms, signifying deity.
[This was the name of Santana's second album, which includes the Fleetwood Mac cover "Black Magic Woman."]
bête noire: A person or concept that is anathema; the bane of one's existence.
[Bryan Ferry's seventh album, which includes the song "Kiss And Tell."]
bon vivant: Enjoying the best things in life.
[From Paul Simon's "American Tune": "Still, you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant / So far away from home."]
cult of personality: A heroic public image created around the leader of a movement or country, often via mass media.
[Living Colour introduced me to this concept with their first single from the album Vivid.]
desperado: A desperate, dangerous outlaw.
[From the Eagles song of the same name. It started playing on the radio when I was 3, and basically never stopped, so it was without a doubt my first exposure to this word.]
eponymous: Self-titled (e.g. Tracy Chapman by Tracy Chapman is an eponymous album.)
[R.E.M., in their typically droll way, named their 1988 greatest hits collection Eponymous. It's also a favorite word of rock critics.]
eurythmic: Harmonious.
[I learned this word thanks to Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox naming their band Eurythimcs.]
jitney: (1) A small bus. (2) An unlicensed taxi.
[From Northern State's "Things I'll Do": "Plan you a trip, get you there in a jitney / Write you a song, get you soundin' like Britney."]
maharishi: Spiritual teacher.
[I didn't learn this one from any song or album, but rather from reading up on The Beatles, and the time they spent with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.]
mahout: A person who keeps and/or drives an elephant.
[From Joan Armatrading's "Drop The Pilot": "Drop the mahout, I'm the easy rider / Don't use your army to fight a losing battle."]
mistral: A strong, cold, often violent wind that occurs around France and Italy.
[Heart has a song I love called "Mistral Wind", which uses the mistral as a metaphor for joyfully losing control.]
rostrum: A stage or a raised platform for performing.
[From The Who's "Sally Simpson": "But soon the atmosphere was cooler as Tommy gave a lesson / Sally just had to let him know she loved him, and leapt up on the rostrum!"]
rubicon: A point of no return.
[Journey taught me this one with the song "Rubicon" on their Frontiers album.]
slàinte mhath: A Scots Gaelic toast, literally meaning "good health."
[Marillion entitled a song "Slàinte Mhath" on their brilliant Clutching At Straws album.]
son et lumière: A sound and light show.
[From Joe Jackson's "Glamour And Pain": "I'm hanging in the air / I look in your window at my own lipstick reflection there / And behind it such a precious son et lumière / Of all the normal stuff, about which I'm supposed to care / I'd like to smash right through / And help myself to your silverware."]
synchronicity: Meaningful coincidence
[Carl Jung fully articulated this concept in 1952, and Sting seized upon it in 1983, releasing the Police album Synchronicity and naming two songs after the concept: "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II."]
terrazzo: A multicolored floor of marble or stone chips.
[From Don Henley's "Drivin' With Your Eyes Closed": "So before The Death of Lovers and The Punishment of Pride / Let's go scrape across the terrazzo / It's just too hot outside."]
tinnitus: A severe ringing in the ears.
[This is another one I didn't learn from a song or album, but rather from paying attention to the music world. Pete Townshend stopped playing electric guitar for a good long time because he suffers from tinnitus.]

I do have a couple of COMBO SCORES to award as well:

desultory philippic: A rambling, somewhat disappointing tirade
[Simon and Garfunkel put "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)" on their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme album and sent me to the dictionary twice!]
scaramouche, scaramouche, can you do the fandango?: Clown from commedia dell'arte, can you perform a Portuguese folk dance?
[Unlike many rock songs, which string meaningless lyrics together out of nonsense words, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" strings meaningless lyrics together out of actual words.]

Words I Learned From Comics

2008-11-07T05:15:55Z

Today's installment focuses on some of the vocabulary I've gained from my lifelong enthusiasm for comics. I've been a Marvel comics reader since I was six years old, as well as an aficionado of newspaper strips, Mad magazine (in my tweens/teens, anyway), graphic novels, and these days, webcomics.

corsair: A pirate.
[The X-Man Cyclops was originally written as an orphan, but in the 70s, Chris Claremont decided to reintroduce Cyclops's father as Corsair, the leader of a band of space pirates. Space pirates! Cosmic freebooters! (I may have learned freebooter from this source as well.)]
defenestrate: To throw something or someone out of a window.
[Early in Peter David's hilarious and satisfying run on X-Factor (issue #71 to be exact), the musclebound mutant known as Strong Guy says this: "I'm watcha call 'sensitive.' 'Course, some blork got a problem with that... then I'll defenestrate him." When I looked this up, I was delighted to discover that English has a special word just for throwing somebody out a window. What a great language.]
effendi: A Middle Eastern term for a respected man.
[Stan Lee has an abiding love for unusual, colorful words. When he developed the editorial personality of Marvel, he was known to run wild with the alliteration, producing news column headings along the lines of "A Cacophonous Collection Of Captivating Capsule Comments Calculated To Corral Your Consciousness!" He also instilled certain linguistic tics, one of which was the frequent use of "effendi", as in, "Don't worry, effendi, we'll catch you up on the plot as we go!"]
excelsior: Ever upward.
[And then there's the most iconic Lee-ism of all. Stan used to write a column in the comics called "Stan's Soapbox," in which he expounded about whatever was on his mind or, more often, whatever new product the company was about to offer. He ended each column with an enthusiastic "Excelsior!" (I had to consciously work not to put exclamation points on the word and definition above.) Apparently, this is also the Latin motto of New York state.]
hoary: Extremely old.
[Another place where Lee's logophilia was allowed to run wild was in the arcane incantations of Dr. Strange. There were plenty of words to learn from these, so I chose one arbitrarily, from the frequently-invoked "Hoary Hosts Of Hoggoth."]
invincible: Impossible to defeat.
[To punch up his titles, Stan would throw an adjective before the hero's name on the cover: "The Amazing Spider-Man" or "The Mighty Thor". In the case of "The Incredible Hulk," the adjective has practically become part of the character's name. With "The Invincible Iron Man," the adjective was new to my 7-year-old self. There's another one of those coming later.]
katzenjammer: Loud, chaotic noise.
[It wasn't just Marvel comics that taught me new words. My interest in them led me to scour the library for whatever I could find about comics history, and in the process I ran across The Katzenjammer Kids, a comic strip from the early 20th century. I figured out later that Katzenjammer was not only the name of the strip's central characters, it was a descriptor of them as well.]
martinet: A strict, pitiless disciplinarian.
[I was a huge fan of Chris Claremont's New Mutants series in the early 80s, and read those issues over and over. That must be why whole phrases from them still stick in my mind, 25 years after my first reading. For instance, in New Mutants #7, when the team thinks one of its teammates has died in an explosion, Professor X sends them on vacation rather than having them search for her. A couple of X-Men question his decision, and he explains that the entity who caused the explosion is too dangerous for the young team: "For the moment, it is best they think Shan dead -- and me a heartless martinet. They may hate me, but at least they'll be alive."]
mutant: An organism whose genetic makeup is unique due to a spontaneous change in DNA.
[The word "mutant" itself was new to me when I first started reading about the X-Men in Son Of Origins Of Marvel Comics. According to Lee, he wanted to call the book The Mutants, but was shot down by his publisher Martin Goodman, who insisted that younger readers (what Lee calls "the bubble-gum brigade") wouldn't understand the word and would avoid the book. Given that I was a member of that very brigade at the time I was reading, I'm pretty sure Goodman was wrong.]
picayune: Trivial; petty.
[Here's another one from a newspaper strip, this time Bloom County, whose in-universe newspaper was the Bloom Picayune. One of the strip's paperback collections even included a sample copy.]
prehensile: Able to grasp or hold things.
[Lee isn't the only one with tics. Chris Claremont would use the same phrases over and over, such as calling the X-Men "occasionally outlaw superheroes." One of his favorites was to constantly remind us that Nightcrawler's tail is prehensile, allowing him to grab things with it.]
ragnarok: The apocalypse, or "Doom of the gods", in Norse mythology, in which deities clash and destroy the universe.
[Stan explicitly embraced mythology, going so far as to make a superhero out of Thor, the Norse god of thunder. (That Thor spoke mainly in Elizabethan English is a mystery I will not attempt to unravel here.) In adopting Thor, he brought in not only a huge supporting cast from the Norse myths, but many of their plot points as well. Thor and his fellow gods have been through many a Marvel ragnarok over the last 40 years.]
rapport: Sympathetic connection between people, marked by the sharing of perspectives.
[Claremont liked to lean on this word to describe close relationships with one or more telepaths involved, whether it be Cyclops and Jean Grey or Dani Moonstar and Rahne Sinclair.]
revanche: Revenge; retaliation.
[During the 1990s, X-Men continuity got so baffling that I pretty much disengaged from most of it. At some point during that period, Fabian Nicieza created a character called Revanche, whose most interesting quality was her vocabulary-enriching name.]
sobriquet: A descriptive nickname.
[This one was another Lee-ism, as in, "He calls himself Mr. Fantastic, a swingin' sobriquet if there ever was one!"]
tatterdemalion: A person wearing ragged, tattered clothing.
[A minor supervillain in the Marvel Universe, Tatterdemalion lived up to his name with a ragged, tattered costume.]
telepathy: The ability to read minds and/or project one's thoughts.
[Keep in mind, I was quite young when I started reading comics. It was my first encounter with the idea of psychic powers -- when Charles Xavier was described as "telepathic," I had to look it up. Along this line, I also learned telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and other such words for mentally derived superpowers.]
uncanny: Eerie, unsettling, bizarre; seemingly supernatural in origin.
[Like "The Invincible Iron Man", "The Uncanny X-Men" introduced me to a brand new and very spiffy adjective.]
whimsy: Fanciful, illogical, quaint.
[My memory of this one is fuzzy -- it was in some humor magazine, probably a Mad knockoff like Cracked or Crazy. In its table of contents, it contained an expressive row of faces demonstrating various moods of humor, such as satire, drollery, and whimsy. I don't remember anything else about the magazine, but I do remember that captivating word.]

Sometimes you get not just one brand new word but a whole string of them thrown at you. For those, I am awarding a COMBO SCORE, and I am pleased to give the first one to Avengers #93:

Poltroon! Craven recreant!: Coward! Cowardly coward!
[See, the Super-Skrull is fighting the Vision, and the Vision decides to flee rather than continue the fight. Because the Vision can pass through walls, the Super-Skrull can't give chase, and so he shouts this in frustration at the fleeing android. It's the kind of moment that makes me love those early Marvels.]

Also, I should give extra credit to Chris Claremont for teaching me a variety of foreign words. One of Claremont's enduring mannerisms was to make sure we were constantly reminded of each character's nationality by either transliterating that character's speech (e.g. "I dinna ken what ye mean, Dani!") or peppering it with foreign phrases, or, most often, both. Consequently, Japanese characters were always hissing that Wolverine was "gaijin" (foreigner), Colossus was constantly exclaiming "boizhe moi!" (my God!) and so on.

Hope

2008-11-05T04:53:42Z

In 2004, I was firmly, completely convinced that after the close election in 2000, and the disaster of the previous four years, there was no way that our country would ever re-elect George W. Bush. On the day after that election, I was as upset, depressed, and angry as I'd ever been in my life. After that happened, I decided that the USA was, essentially, a lost cause. I felt fundamentally alienated from my country, a country that would legitimately elect George W. Bush after not-even-really electing him once, and seeing him bungle his job badly. I felt as if my hopes had died on that day.

Today, I found out that they were only mostly dead. Today I feel so proud to be part of a country that would defy the world's story about it, defy my own story about it, and elect Barack Obama as its president by a stunning electoral margin. Today I look forward to having a president I really, genuinely like. I don't think I've ever felt that way.

I keep thinking of a passage in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, in which Angelou, her family, and almost her entire town of Stamps, Arkansas was gathered around the radio in her Grandmother's general store, listening to Joe Louis fight Primo Carnera in 1935. As Louis would get in a good jab, the crowd would cheer. When Louis looks as if he's about to go down, Angelou writes, "My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree." And when Louis finally triumphs, and is declared the champion of the world:

Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother's son. He was the strongest man in the world. People drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas. Some of the men went behind the Store and poured white lightning in their soft-drink bottles, and a few of the bigger boys followed them. Those who were not chased away came back blowing their breath in front of themselves like proud smokers.

It would take an hour or more before the people would leave the Store and head for home. Those who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town. It wouldn't do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world."

I love us for what we did tonight. It feels really good to love us again.

Words I Learned From Infocom, Deluxe Edition

2008-11-03T05:16:00Z

As revealed in the comments section of my original Words Infocom Taught Me post, we learn words from lots of unexpected places. Reading Eugene Ehrlich's Highly Selective Thesaurus has reminded me of many of them. Now that I've finished the book, I've decided to write a short series of blog posts, detailing words I've learned from various geeky sources. First in line is a fuller list of words from Infocom games, this time complete with definitions and comments explaining the context of each word, for those who don't know the Infocom canon by heart:

analgesic: A medicine to reduce pain.
[The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I can't quite believe I forgot this one the first time around. You start the game with a "buffered analgesic" in your inventory -- in other words, an aspirin. A trip to the dictionary makes the headache puzzle much easier to solve.]
burin: A chisel with a sharp point, used for engraving.
[Spellbreaker. "Featureless white cubes" are the centerpiece objects of this game, and you need to use your magic burin to engrave them with names, so that they can be distinguished from each other.]
cyclopean: Massive, enormous.
[Spellbreaker again. A memorable room is described as littered with "cyclopean blocks of stone." I took this to mean "huge rocks", but I see on looking up the word that it also describes a style of masonry in which large irregular blocks of stone are fitted together to create a structure.]
EBCDIC: A binary encoding for text used at IBM, infamous for its incomprehensibility.
[Zork I and Zork II. The Maintenance Room in Zork I contains this sentence: On the wall in front of you is a group of buttons, which are labeled in EBCDIC. In other words, labeled in such a way as to make their labels totally useless.

Again in Zork II: Along one wall of the room are three buttons which are, respectively, round, triangular, and square. Naturally, above the buttons are instructions written in EBCDIC.]
footpad: A thief.
[Zork II. A Frobozz Magic Alarm Company alarm has a sign on the wall reading "Hello, Footpad!", just before it drops a big cage on you.]
gazebo: A freestanding pavilion with an open structure, often found in parks or gardens.
[Zork II features one of these inside a garden room. It even contains a lovely china teapot, and a unicorn grazes nearby.]
gnomon: The part of a sundial that casts a shadow.
[Trinity. The sundial is a central metaphor in Trinity, and a gnomon is a key component to at least one major puzzle. The game even came with a sundial feelie, complete with gnomon.]
infidel: An unbeliever, one who rejects the tenets of a faith.
[Infidel, of course. The title character of the game is one of the first, perhaps the first, unsympathetic player characters in IF. He is an archaeologist who treats his Egyptian assistants with contempt, leading them to drug his drink and leave him to die in the desert.]
menhir: A large, upright standing stone.
[Zork II again. A room description:
Menhir Room This is a large room which was evidently used once as a quarry. Many large limestone chunks lie helter-skelter around the room. Some are rough-hewn and unworked, others smooth and well-finished. One side of the room appears to have been used to quarry building blocks, the other to produce menhirs (standing stones). Obvious passages lead north and south. One particularly large menhir, at least twenty feet tall and eight feet thick, is leaning against the wall blocking a dark opening leading southwest. On this side of the menhir is carved an ornate letter "F".]
oubliette: A dungeon whose only door is a hatch in the ceiling, too high to reach.
[Spellbreaker has an oubliette room -- escaping from it is one of the game's puzzles.]
reliquary: A container for sacred relics.
[This is a treasure container in Beyond Zork, owned by the redoubtable "Cardinal Toolbox."]
reticule: A small handbag held closed with a drawstring, which can be worn around one's wrist.
[Plundered Hearts was Infocom's only game in the romance genre, and its 17th-century heroine carried a reticule around her wrist, an elegant in-character solution to inventory management issues. It even contained one as a feelie. (By the way, I just fired up the game to make sure I knew what I was talking about, and noticed that its very first sentence contains the word "arquebus", an early firearm!)]
skink: A type of lizard.
[One of Trinity's most brilliant puzzles involved the inevitable death of a skink.]
topiary: Hedges trimmed to particular shapes.
[Zork II yet again. Just a few rooms south of that gazebo is this:
Topiary This is the southern end of a formal garden. Hedges hide the cavern walls and mosses provide dim illumination. Fantastically shaped hedges and bushes are arrayed with geometric precision. They have not recently been clipped, but you can discern creatures in the shapes of the bushes: There is a dragon, a unicorn, a great serpent, a huge misshapen dog, and several human figures. On the west side of the garden the path leads through a rose arbor into a tunnel.

Creepily, the animals sometimes move around when you're not looking.]
sarcophagus: A stone coffin.
[Both Zork I and Infidel contained one of these as a treasure receptacle.]
verbose: Given to excessive wordiness.
[Of course! Every Infocom game offered a VERBOSE command, which would prompt the game to always print room descriptions. I myself switched into VERBOSE mode long ago.]

It looks like Zork II wins the Infocom top vocabulary builder award!

Where's my VCR, my stereo, my TV show?

2008-10-20T14:24:26Z

Last night, our old VCR finally gave up the ghost. This was a drag, but not altogether surprising. It was quite old, and had been slowly breaking down. Too bad about the SNL tape that is irretrievably stuck in there -- guess Laura won't get to see that. I lay all blame at the feet of Sarah Palin -- it must have been the experience of recording her that finally killed the thing.

So anyway, after I discovered this problem last night, and made it worse by trying to fix it, I decided to just head to my friendly neighborhood Best Buy and get a new VCR. Only I discovered that the outside world has changed on me, dagnabit. It took a subsequent Circuit City trip to convince me of this, but apparently retail stores no longer sell VCRs, only VCR/DVD combos. So okay, fair enough, I'm not entirely crazy about our current DVD player, and there was a Sony combo there for only $99, so I went ahead and got it.

BUT:

There are some fatal flaws to this new arrangement. The new combos (at least, the ones costing less than $250) apparently lack a tuner, so they can only do "dumb" recording from a line in. Now, the box made this pretty clear, and I thought maybe I could work around it using an extra VCR I had around that doesn't record properly but does tune into the cable signal just fine. However, I failed to account for the fact that doing this makes automatic recording so annoying as to be infeasible. Whereas before I could just set a bunch of presets to record TV shows on whatever channel at whatever time, now I can set a timer to start recording from the line in, but I have to make sure the VCR is set to the right channel. Hey, if I have to set something manually, I have just lost the benefit of automatic recording.

Perhaps you are thinking this: he needs a DVR! Maybe I do, but what I also need is portability of recordings. See, in our VCR world, the VCR in our living room would tape our various shows, then Laura could pop out the tape and watch them in the kitchen (where we have a combo TV/VCR which lacks a timer but does playback just fine) while she takes care of Dante. I do not know how to accomplish this with a DVR.

So here is my question: how do other people deal with this? My requirements are that I want to automatically (with no manual intervention) record TV shows, and have those recordings available in multiple rooms. I would also love it if I didn't have to spend a lot of money to achieve this goal. Should I just head over to the VCR section of eBay, or what? Is there some cool 21st century solution that I'm not thinking of?

The Magnetic Fields in Boulder, 10/15/08

2008-10-17T15:19:24Z

The crowd at the Boulder Theater on Wednesday night was largely composed of a) hipsters and b) young gay men. There is a fair amount of overlap between these groups. Thick glasses, retro fashions, and big sideburns were much in evidence.

The show was a lot more like a recital than a rock and roll concert. All acoustic instruments, all players seated. From house left to house right they were:

Shirley Simms (vocals only)
Claudia Gonson (piano & vocals)
John Woo (guitar)
Sam Davol (cello)
Stephin Merritt (bouzouki & vocals)

Gonson did most of the talking, and she did it in this very spacey, random, funny persona, which she blamed on lack of oxygen. Merritt threw in the occasional deadpan remark. There was quite a bit of talking between the songs, which I enjoyed very much. A dominant theme was the invention of narrative connections among the songs in the setlist -- for instance, after "The Nun's Litany": "And why did she enter the abbey? Well, you see, one year earlier..." leading to "All My Little Words." There was also quite a bit of comedy interplay, like so:

GONSON: This next song is about Stephin's dog, whose ears are... huge. They're like... they're as big as his head. Would you agree, Stephin?
MERRITT: His ears are *part* of his head.
GONSON: Yeah, but... you know what I... well anyway, it's called "Walking My Gargoyle." One, two, three, four...

For the rest of the show, chihuahua references ensued. "Let's pretend the narrator of this song is also a chihuaha! All the characters are chihuahuas -- then it could be made into a number one movie. Maybe if they remade Pieces Of April with an all-chihuahua cast..." (Merritt did the soundtrack for Pieces Of April, the mention of which also led to much musing on what Oliver Platt is doing these days. Quoth Merritt: "One of the worst things about being on tour is that sometimes you want to look something up on IMDb, but you can't, because you're on stage!")

Even though their new album is all heavy distortion (hence its title) and fuzz, everything sounded totally clean at the concert. It was beautiful. All the cleverness was out there to shine, and the sad and lovely parts were heart-piercing. Apparently Merritt suffers from hyperacuity in his left ear, meaning he's quite sensitive to certain frequencies, including applause. I could see him hold his ear whenever the clapping began, and he kept slipping a silver earplug in and out, including the time when Gonson was rambling to him about some topic, and after a couple of minutes he pulled out his earplug and said, "What?"

The set list was great too -- a healthy mix of old and new, Mag Fields and side bands (Gothic Archies, 6ths, etc). I was thrilled to have some of my all-time favorites included -- "No One Will Ever Love You"; "Yeah! Oh Yeah!"; "Drive On, Driver"; "Grand Canyon"; "The Book Of Love."

All in all, a very good time was had by me. Too bad I had to go to work the next day when I should really have been sleeping!

Words Infocom taught me

2008-10-07T19:17:26Z

One of Textfyre's marketing claims is going to be that interactive fiction teaches literacy: vocabulary, reading comprehension, that sort of thing. (It also teaches typing -- I have long claimed that Infocom taught me how to touch-type, because I was too absorbed in the game to look down at the keyboard.)

The vocabulary claim is certainly true for me. I always suspected that Infocom had a hidden agenda to broaden our vocabularies, because there were always a few words in their games that sent me to the dictionary. When I wrote my first game, I tried to inject a little tribute to this tradition, with a peninsular location I called "Chersonese." I was reminded of this recently as I thumbed through a thesaurus given to me as a gift.

In that spirit, I present an incomplete list of the words I learned from Infocom games:

EBCDIC (Zork I)
gnomon (Trinity)
menhir (Zork II)
oubliette (Spellbreaker)
reliquary (Beyond Zork)
reticule (Plundered Hearts)
skink (Trinity)
topiary (Zork II)

These are just the ones that turned up in a cursory search of my brain. Anybody else got others?

The Hero With A Thousand Bat-themed Gadgets

2008-08-20T04:57:15Z

I just recently finished reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and towards the end, I came across this quote:

"The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today."

This made me think: man, those Dark Knight writers are really tuned into some deep story grooves.

Update to the Dr. Horrible Update

2008-07-20T00:00:52Z

Well, that was a downer. I mean, great to avoid cliches and all, but still: kind of a downer.

And I was having so much fun, too.

Plus, the guy's kinda-girlfriend is dying, and I'm thinking, "Dude! You have a freeze ray! Can't you stop time until the paramedics arrive?" I guess maybe it was out of power.

I am still filled with love for parts I and II. I am filled with ambivalence about part III.